Enhancing User Experience with Interactive Calculators

As competition continues to stiffen among Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) selling goods and services online, user experience can play a critical role in converting leads into customers. Differentiation is key, too, and often times you need to take that extra step to ensure that visitors to your website understand the value they’re getting as customers.

Approaches to improving user experience vary, but many of them require substantial IT knowledge or costly investments, both of which might pose problems for SME owners as far as accessibility is concerned.

Our team has addressed this dilemma with Calconic, a custom interactive calculator builder. The idea is relatively simple but it’s extremely cost-effective and can be a real game-changer in terms of user experience and subsequent conversion rates.

In this post we'll cover:

• Key areas of website UX
• How interactive calculators improve UX
• Examples
• Why use interactive calculators

Key areas of website UX

So when thinking about user experience on your website you have to ensure a couple of things:

• Each customer interaction on your website is fast and smooth - means your website speed, load and optimization on all devices is taken care of.

• Ensure customers don't need to search for information. Every logical decision making question is tackled at the right place and the right time and your website structure does not create confusion when browsing.

• Customers share their information only ONCE so there should be no repeated forms, or procedures that distract the user from conversion. The same rule applies to content, while going through your website, the user shouldn't read the same things over and over again. That will only results in your bounce rates going up.

How can an interactive calculator help in improving website user experience?

The most important moments in your customer journey are the customer touchpoints across your website. These are the moments when a customer interacts with your website wanting to know more about the product, service, your company or looking for something useful.

Interactive calculators are a fantastic tool to use in these moments. Because as a tool they can give customers more clarity than a 5 page blog article. Instant and direct personalized answers is what every customer is looking for. And if you help them along the way, the road to conversion becomes a lot shorter and more enjoyable.

Types of calculators used to improve user experience:

1. Quantity and specs calculation - when a customer is buying wallpaper, tiles, paint, plants for your garden, you need a quantity calculation based on your home or area specs. An interactive calculator was meant for that. Instant calculation of size of their area and how many units they need to buy on your website is a time saver for your customer and definitely bonus points for you as a seller. That’s one hurdle less for your customer to move forward to making a purchase.

2. Product recommendations - another common scenario is when your customer doesn't know which of your products they need to buy when the decision is based on various technical specs.

Interactive calculators can serve as instant advisory forms. Your customer can input personalized information, let’s say it’s their boat size, weight and type, and the calculator could provide an answer of which boat engine they need to buy. No consultations needed. Instant direct answers without any trouble.

3. Serve as an instant order form - To not leave the customer hanging with useful information, an interactive calculator also has the next step prepared. It can include an order form - to let the customer place their order through the calculator. The order will go straight to the company email with all customer details and his order information included. It can also let your customer download the calculation information and generate leads.

Depending on which is the most important to your business case, you can adapt the calculator with explanations about your service or product, include more trust or transparency touchpoints and make the calculator your main web page conversion point.

Examples

Most popular calculators used for improving user experience and user conversion

• Price calculator
• Quantity calculator
• ROI / savings calculator
• Discount calculator
• Product fit (product recommendation)
• Dosage calculator
• Area calculator

One examples is the interactive calculator for topbusinesscard.com which helps customers calculate Top Business Card’s prices and place orders using PayPal Checkout.

Printscreen of custom Interactive calculator on topbusinesscard.com

Another great example of an interactive calculator is the ROI calculator for SUMIG Robotic System, which gives customers an idea about the potential value a product can offer them over the long-term, and much more.

You can try Calconic for free with no time limit, and there are several upgrade options to unlock more calculators and advanced features. In this way, you can get started right away and then find a solution that fits your needs once you realize exactly what a calculator can do for your website and customers.

Why use interactive calculators?

One of the most important factors that makes Calconic such a dynamic solution is the team behind it. We are committed to our product and do whatever we can to support our customers and help them build the perfect calculators for their websites.

Having a visually appealing and interactive calculator is an effective way to engage customers and give them timely and accurate access to information about prices, potential savings, delivery costs, the amount of a given product they might need, and so much more.

Giving potential customers access to precise data and numbers empowers them to make informed decisions and can ultimately facilitate their shift from shopping cart to checkout.

Moreover, interactive calculators can be used to process orders and payment, help simplify and even automate parts of your sales work, produce quality leads, and cut down on the time you spend interacting with leads that aren’t really interested in your product or service in the first place.

In addition to enhancing a website’s user experience, Calconic makes building a web calculator super easy. You can build and add your interactive calculator to your site in a few simple clicks using the drag-and-drop editor, customize its look so it integrates seamlessly into the design of your website, and choose from a wide range of options to build anything from a basic to a more complex web calculator.

If you’re not exactly sure what kind of interactive calculator you want, or need some inspiration to get started, Calconic already has tons of ready-to-use templates that can be added directly onto your website or be further customized to suit your particular needs.

What’s more, Calconic’s web calculators look great on both mobile and desktop websites, and can either be embedded on a specific page of your website or appear as a pop-up – you decide.

Again, it’s a relatively simple solution, but its effectiveness and value, together with the seemingly endless possibilities customizations allow for, can make it an integral part of almost any website.

Summary

User experience plays a critical role in converting leads into customers. An interactive calculator is an effective way to engage customers and give them timely and accurate access to information:

• about prices,
• savings,
• ROI,
• delivery costs,
• the amount of a given product they might need,
• and so much more.

If you want to engage and interact with your website visitors, and turn more leads into real customers, Calconic is a simple solution that is easy to implement and makes an immediate impact.