stage 1
Research
Interviewing the stakeholders I found out that typical visualization project costs depend on these:
Project scale
N of buildings, floors, units
Detalization level
tiny details and decorations require extra efforts
Time limits
the faster needed - the more people have to work on
Installment plan
pre-paid projects are cheaper then the after-paid ones
stage 2
Low-fi prototype
With calculator-like products, I like to build and test Excel prototypes at the early stages. It might seem simplish, but testing Excel formulas brings to the surface the fine-tuned mechanics and layouts, which are to be replicated by the dev team.
So we did Excel.
stage 3
UX engineering
I defined a set of features for the internal and external variations.
Internal use case
focused on arranging the work forces to get the best outcome at cheapest price
External use case
finding balance between the building model fanciness and its total cost
Then I designed the UX flows:
stage 4
Interface
Having the UX flows defined, I came up with an idea of three-block interface layout.
First block is for visual hints. Second is the calculator itself, with a number of inputs and selectors. The third block is for the calc results.
The background color of the middle block is changing dynamically depending on selected project complexity.
The background color of the middle block is changing dynamically depending on selected project complexity.
