Bezos Art Calculator
The Bezos Art Calculator is a project that I started in Critical Experiences. This is a calculator designed to encourage artists to stop making art for themselves or for the public, and instead focus their efforts for a set period of time solely on making art for Jeff Bezos. While I had it set up as a proof of concept the math wasn't actually working on it, the UX was overly complicated, and as a result the javascript for the calculations was a big jumble of garbage. I also realized that it had been awhile since I worked in github, and had moved to a new computer. It took me awhile to reset things up and reorient myself to the git functions.
Try the updated code here: https://bettyfileti.github.io/bez-art-os/
Resolving the UX First
I started by interacting with the tool and trying to capture what I was thinking about as a user. In doing so, I realized that I wanted to play with the selling price, and have all of that information together. Then I wanted to play with the artist's salary. Other than that, the additional controls were adding in complications without adding enough to the overall experience. With this feedback in mind, I set about redesigning the UX in Figma.
Debugging Math
With a much more simple approach, it was not too difficult to rework what was already built in order to match this new version. As I was building though, I realized that something wasn't quite right with the math still. It was frustrating to debug because of the number of variables involved. I decided to simulate the math in a spreadsheet, so I could easily debug the math to pinpoint the problem.
Finalizing
With the math resolved, I was able to start thinking about this table. After getting the structure in place, I decided that it was adding more complication to the user's experience, when a more simplified functionality would suffice. I decided to omit this section entirely.
Next, I wanted to have Jeff Bezos' net worth be pulled in dynamically from here (https://github.com/jesseokeya/Forbes400). To isolate this function, I built a separate html page while I worked out how to pull in the data that I wanted. Once that was resolved, I moved the functionality over to the calculator and pushed the update to github.
I am happy to see this project resolved and shareable! The last outstanding item to tackle is resolving the input fields as a number type, which means I can't introduce thousand separators. There seem to be a number of workarounds but nothing that felt easy enough to implement and/or maintain. It seems like I might need to convert it to a text input field, and lose the arrow up/down functionality. Would need to evaluate that for accessibility and mobile functionality.