User interface of an Energy Price Web Calculator

June 2010 / Category: Professional, Web / Tags: , , , ,

Reed Business approached GipHouse to develop a web-application that calculates the energy prices on www.bouwkosten.nl. We worked in a small team according to the waterfall method with GIT version control. I was responsible for the user interface, which was done in ASP.NET with C#, MySQL and HTML with a little JS and CSS.

The main challenge was creating a user-friendly interface. The calculator required many input parameters – some of which were depended on each other. To make this user-friendly, I splat the inputs into multiple steps. This way, the user was not confused by inputs suddenly changing because of dependence. Every previous step was summarized succinctly, so the user remained aware of the all input parameters. This short summary also preserved the precious screen space required to display the results (a large table).

To summarize:

  • User interface design
  • HTML with a little JS and CSS
  • ASP.NET with C#
  • MySQL database
  • GIT version control
  • Waterfall method
  • Small team for a (virtual) software house (GipHouse)

I worked part-time from februari to june 2010 on this project.