Background
The task was to design a salary calculator for Tinkoff Journal to attract traffic and keep the audience engaged. The calculator is supposed to help a reader see how much money one should earn in order to relocate comfortably between cities in Russia considering different cost of living. Russia is vast and the cost of living differs drastically between different regions, hence the relevance of such calculator.
My role
I was responsible for designing the calculator: how it works in principle, what should be user interface and interactions. The calculator also had to be consistent with the rest of the content and reusing same UI components and patterns.
I worked closely with the editor and data analyst in order to define how the calculator should work, its underlying assumptions and calculation method. My goal was to make sure the calculator is accurate enough for readers to trust, engaging and easy to use. I thought carefully about what inputs to ask readers and what outputs would be most helpful to understand cost of living differences between cities.
I created multiple prototypes that helped us understand what works and what doesn't, designed and documented the user flows, and assited with testing of the final product.
Solution
The calculator asks a reader the cities of origin and destination, income, rent and how much they save each month. Based on these inputs it calculates the income required to support the same comfort of living in the city of destination.
Apart from the salary, the calculator shows the prices comparison for basic foods, outlets, fuel, rent and entertainment to help users understand how different the prices are in the city of destination.
Impact
The salary calculator attracted 192k views and 100+ comments from the readers. Thanks to Stas and Tinkoff Journal team for this nice opportunity.