Rekenmodules

Rekenmodules.nl was the storefront for InterPlein’s calculators, built in Helmond while I was still studying. Mortgages, pensions, savings, investments, tax, and a long tail of things people needed to work out and could not.

Each module answered one question. What does this mortgage actually cost. What is left after tax. Which of these two products is better for me. They were grouped into categories down the left, with a top ten of the most used ones on the front page, because the honest measure of a tool like this is which ones people come back to.

I developed it and designed how it worked. A wizard like it was not obvious then, which is easy to miss now: there was no pattern to copy for walking someone through a financial question one step at a time.

The paper prototype was about ten metres long and several metres high. That is what it takes to lay every branch of a wizard out at once, and it is the only way to see the shape of the whole thing before any of it is built.

Beyond that, the work was the modules themselves: assembling them, integrating them, and keeping the site running as webmaster. I also directed the graphic designers and HTML designers building them.

The site was recognised in the Ilse Internetgids, then the main Dutch web guide, in print, as Beste Rekenmodules website in 2001.