Why do people move? Insights from our brainstorm

We like to meet up early in the morning for 2 hour brainstorm sessions. Today we spent time thinking about the Housing experience and asked ourselves fundamental questions like:

1. Why do people move?
2. Why should we help them find new places to live?
3. What do they envision when they see themselves in the future?

We came up with three key insights, which I think will inform our design process in the upcoming weeks. While these sound obvious when we talk about them, recognising and addressing them empowers us to justify bold decisions. I tried to correlate these insights to key interactions.

1. People move to upgrade their lifestyle. Since childhood, every time I have moved to a new place it has earmarked a new chapter in my life. My perception of myself changes. My social circle, my daily activities and routine change as well.
   I have never downgraded or moved to a smaller apartment. My first move was to a bigger house with my family and my second one was to a duplex with friends. Both were beginnings of entirely new eras in my life.
   So when we position potential properties as residences to our customers, we should ideally show them how these would change their lifestyles. We should customise how we present these properties on the basis of their aspirations. Imagine swiping through a list of lifestyle upgrades, instead of a list of empty rooms.
2. Buying a house is a heavy decision. The stress involved with browsing, selecting and narrowing down on a choice is colossal. The experience of sifting through all these choices is thus much more stressful than say browsing a feed on Instagram/ SoundCloud / Pinterest. The implications of making a bad choice are more consequential than buying the wrong T-shirt on Amazon.
   The browsing experience hence should reflect and accommodate that pressure. The user must be assured that he is not overlooking any potential candidates. Our platform needs to accommodate FOMO — Fear of Missing Out. Search results should be more like a checklist rather than a list of cards.
3. Indians worry. We analyse every metric and make risk averse decisions based on excel sheets rather than instinct. India is a developing country and the mindset reflects that. People simply don’t have as much time to enjoy their lives. It’s about hitting key metrics and achieving right numbers at the right time.
   So a house’s key metrics almost matter more than pictures of the house itself. Our platform needs to recognise the context for which it has been created. We’re not AirBNB. Many apartments look like they would never make it into a designers mockup. But that’s the data we have to play with. Our designs need to address this discrepancy.

Over the next few weeks we hope our conversations will lead us to radical new products our users love. This is an attempt to escape the dogma of building an app which is supposed to perform a certain set of functions.