Explore our thinking about User Experience

iscover how GenAI is revolutionizing Finance. Learn about strategies to create intuitive AI-driven experiences that improve usability, build trust, and address unique challenges faced by financial professionals and consumers.

Learn how to create intuitive and effective interfaces for domain experts. Discover strategies for working with complex data sets, visualizing information, and leveraging AI. Build a strong foundation for data-driven product development.

Watch our webinar and learn to modernize finance desktops with FDC3 & OpenFin. Streamline development, enhance UX, and future-proof apps.

Expero's Connected Finance platform simplifies financial data analysis with Morningstar insights. User-friendly, quick to market, and easily integrates. Make informed decisions fast.

Q: In usability tests, people say our application is easy to use. But in the field, very few users are actually using the app. What should we do?

The webinar will delve into key considerations when designing front-end applications for capital markets, including how to incorporate real-time data visualization and analysis.

During this panel discussion with industry experts on how the future of the financial desktop is evolving, we talk through different ways enterprises and solution providers should be thinking about their desktop strategies.

In this talk we’ll discuss patterns and anti-patterns from real-world projects including: how to split your application into components, using components in data & analytics for agility, enabling users to configure and “no-code” their own applications, and how components help to sequence a modernization program.

The focus of this webinar is to show you how new technology trends in 2021 can increase the usability and accuracy of your finance analytics.

Delve into the dashboard capabilities of Expero's Financial Services Toolkit, used for portfolio analysis and recommendation, compliance information, and team sharing workflows.

Take a deeper look into how Expero's Financial Services Toolkit widgets are built, including: balancing through trade, running 'The Art of the Possible' scenarios, and compliance interactions with Jupyter Notebook.

Lynn Pausic, cofounder of Expero, discusses five ways to use 'humans-in-the-loop' to improve machine learning accuracy & increase trust during the online CTO Summit on data science.

The focus of this webinar is to share some of the important design and technology factors that enable you to build successful front- and middle-office applications.

Learn more about how Expero partners with TigerGraph in TigerGraph Toolkits for Financial Crimes, increased visibility & optimization with ER/MD demos, C360 applications, use cases involving the Financial Services industry, and more.

Learn more about how Expero partners with TigerGraph in TigerGraph Toolkits, increased visibility & optimization with demo applications, use cases, and more.

Real World Platform & UX Design for the Modern Financial Desktop

Demonstration of Expero workbench for detecting and investigating fraudulent activity such as AML, credit card transactions and internal threats.

Data Products Strategy and Implementation

Data Products: What Product Managers Need to Know about Productizing Data Science

Getting your graph to scale is only half the battle. Learn here how Expero helps businesses understand their data and make real time decisions using custom visualizations and UX.

Advances in automation of data analysis, graph analytics, data lineage, conversational queries and IoT analytics are widely predicted for 2020. Expero has capabilities and assets already in place.

Natural language processing is a powerful tool in building investigatory user interfaces for data exploration. See how conversation UI can be used to interrogate highly connected data to produce context driven data visualization and analytics.

Building data products in your organization to realize data science ROI and never before seen data insights.

Utilizing real time optimization with an event streaming platform.

Join us for this quick deep dive on how machine learning and analytics can be used to get insights into your data & scheduling/managing fleets.

See how compiled data sources allow for real-time mapping of road safety and current conditions.

Supply chain planning demo showing real-time visibility into demand and capacity planning.

Structured Finance investors often miss opportunities to maximize portfolios due to a lack of state of the art tools and processes.

Wireframes are intended to call out key moments and interactions in software design in order to provide clarity into how something should look, feel, and function.

Dashboard showing details regarding infections resistant to antibiotics found in hospitals geographically.

Learn how DataStax Graph Technology will increase customer loyalty, identify and resolve customer issues and provide strategic up-selling capabilities. Utilizing DataStax Graph Technology will allow you to visualize the customer journey increasing customer satisfaction by providing meaningful interactions. Join us to learn how to maximize resources with Graph Technology and finally get an all encompassing view of your customer.

Moving to a public or private cloud can dramatically reduce operational costs and speed up delivery of key features. But how do you get there from here? In this seminar we’ll jump into pragmatic ways to improve the way legacy applications are built and deployed as well as how to take an incremental approach to modernize those applications.

Is your software built on sunsetting technology like VB6, .NET, etc? Do you have low user satisfaction because of outdated software? Does it take too long to develop and roll out new features? Are you losing ground to solutions that offer mobile versions? Is it becoming difficult and expensive to maintain staff with legacy knowledge? Is your on-premise legacy infrastructure costly to maintain?

Trying to modernize monolithic legacy applications is hard: these applications are core drivers of the business and the risk of messing them up is too great. However, as time goes on, the cost of maintaining these monoliths grows.

Software and web developers often wear many hats, including the UX/UI hat. But some developers lack the knowledge and skills to design UIs or to collaborate effectively with UX designers and researchers.

Software and web developers often wear many hats, including the UX/UI hat. But some developers lack the knowledge to design UIs or to collaborate effectively with UX designers and researchers.

As a user researcher, I’m always inclined to say, “Test everything, all the time!” when people ask, “What/when/how should we validate with users?” That’s my pie in the sky: the place where there’s all the time and all the budget in the world to get every last detail or spec just right for the good of the user, the product, and, ultimately, the business. But that’s not real life. Projects run on strict budgets and tight timelines, and there’s not always a lot of wiggle room.

Congratulations! Your data is up and running in a graph database and you have big plans for this technology. But now the system is overtaxed and not performing properly. Don't worry- the database may not be the culprit. Proper user experience and visualization techniques can greatly improve performance and dynamic data interaction.

Webinar presentation on how to combine Graph databases with an iterative, user-driven approach and the latest UI tools to enable your team to start creating valuable user experiences with graph data.

This year at the Data Day 2017 conference in Austin,TX, keynote speaker Emil Eifrem declared 2017 the Year of Graph. Graph data storage certainly is becoming more mainstream, with a myriad of both commercial and open-source options currently available and maturing at an accelerated pace. But so what? Why should user experience practitioners, or anyone else that is not a database administrator, care about this trend in data storage technology?

What does the term “search” mean to you?

Product owners and stakeholders have a tendency to skip over discovery research and go straight to design—and then skip over validation research and go right to release. One of the main drivers behind this tendency is the fact that looking at designs is fun. Looking at numbers and bulleted lists of findings is not (as much) fun (for stakeholders). With designs, they get to see their product progressing and growing from inception to build. Data is more behind-the-scenes; it may drive design, but so what?

One of the major hesitations from product stakeholders regarding end-user engagement, specifically user testing, is that they often don’t want anyone to see it till it’s “perfect” or “ready” or “MVP.”

When designing and developing software, it is critical to take into account the limitations of the technology employed, especially hardware—things like computers, boxes and other physical devices. But there’s another aspect to hardware that should be taken into account and is often overlooked: the user.

Visual design is about more than keeping up with popular design trends, especially for complex apps

Our spin on how UX teams have continued to tailor our UX design principles to the product development process.

As Agile principles and Lean methodologies continue to take center stage in product management and strategy, it’s easy to get caught up in daily scrums and design iterations and shoot right past the user research (UR).

If you know anything about Expero, you know we specialize in solving “complex problems.” This means we’re not working on your average brochure website or e-commerce app. We’re tackling apps and softwares targeted to niche domains with expert end-users who have very specific needs and goals to solve their very complicated problems.

Achieving user adoption goals for enterprise software can be challenging.

Smartphone and tablet experiences are a major force influencing product development, irrespective of industry, according to an internal survey we recently conducted with our clients. Business users want to access their software applications from a myriad of devices, all behaving correctly regardless of form factor.

What do my users want to do with Big Data? How do they want to visualize it, interact with it and manage it? How big is my data, really? How much data can a human deal with at one time, and how much data should we process at one time? How can the UX accommodate data sources that respond at different rates?

What do my users want to do with Big Data? How do they want to visualize it, interact with it and manage it? How big is my data, really? How much data can a human deal with at one time, and how much data should we process at one time? How can the UX accommodate data sources that respond at different rates?

In this webinar, Expero highlights the major differences between static wireframes and interactive prototypes, shows examples of the design fidelity spectrum, and outlines the best ways to leverage wireframes and prototypes throughout the product design life cycle.

As a user researcher, I am, of course, an evangelist of all things research. I love research! I love reading everything and learning everything and understanding everything I possibly can about a subject. Infographics are neat but I want more more more information! Give it to me—all of it! As a user researcher, I also, of course, realize that not everybody feels the same way. Often including clients.

Expero's Lynn Pausic and Chad Huff present best practices for creating useful and usable interactive visualizations for complex data sets, starting with ascertaining what your users will do with the data.

Ever wonder about the best way to visualize your application’s data sets?

Using UI design patterns can lead to a 50% increase in product development efficiency, and it can dramatically improve usability and user adoption.

I’m a fan of Yahoo for news and email, but I’m not a fan of their new “two-tap rule.” The rule states that once a user is in a Yahoo application, it should take only two taps to do anything the user wants to do. Fast-to-use apps are the goal here. The two-tap rule sounds a lot like our field’s misguided “three-click rule,” which Expero cautioned against in 2007.

Is Google’s Material Design for complex software? My first reaction after reading through these new Google guidelines was: no. There’s no way these simple rules will translate seamlessly to complex enterprise-class applications—the kinds of projects that Expero excels at—at least not without starting over and removing 90% of the features/functionality that users want at their fingertips.

Many organizations haven’t embraced UI design patterns, despite their growing popularity among UX professionals. Those organizations are missing out on a ton of benefits for Product Management, Engineering, Marketing, UX and the business as a whole.

Q: I have a new job as a UI designer, and my company just doesn’t understand User Experience. Development runs the show, and they think my job is to design icons and color palettes. What’s the best way to explain UX so that everybody gets it?

Producing great user experiences in an Agile environment can be a challenge. As a designer who has been working in the User Experience (UX) field for over 20 years and as part of Agile teams since 2006, I have truly come to embrace Agile. Dare I say, often I prefer it. As the product releases move ever faster, Agile, Kanban and other Lean methods are here to stay. It’s time for the UX field to get better educated on these topics and embrace change. Many aspects of Agile and Lean methodologies are good for UX. Here are a few tenets of going Agile-Lean that we should be using to our advantage:

I had an interesting discussion with a coworker while planning a new feature for our current project. We are practicing Domain Driven Design and maintain a strict separation between the GUI and the domain logic. We actually treat them as separate applications.

Q: How can we find people to be in our studies?

We’re redesigning our site, but there’s internal debate about whether the new design is any better than the current site. What’s the best way to determine which one is better?

Q: We run think-aloud usability tests at my company, but some people here don’t pay attention to the results because we don’t get much “hard” data. Do we need to run different tests?

Q: Someone on our website redesign team wants to include a list of 100+ links at the bottom of every page (to mirror Salesforce.com’s approach). Are a lot of companies including essentially their site map on every page?

Q: We get feedback from users when we’re able to do usability tests, which is not often enough. What other sources are good for user data?

Q: What are the pros and cons of remote usability testing?

My company’s site has links that say “click here” or “click here for more info”. I think our links should be more specific, but other people here say it’s OK because they see it on other websites. What do you think?

Q: My company thinks about customer requirements but does not think about end-users. What’s your advice?

Q: My company just switched to an Agile Development Process. How can I incorporate user-centered design and research activities into Agile Development?

Q: For setup pages which are generally only used for getting started, do you recommend wizards to guide the user through the steps?

Q: When is a hierarchy too deep, and what are the alternatives to using a deep hierarchy to access and organize information?

Q: How do you do research for an online wellness program that spans the course of several weeks and measures changes to behavior over time?

Q: How do you design a transactional page that requires horizontal scrolling? Do you freeze the left frame like Excel, or use tabs?

Q: Are there any usability issues with using drag-and-drop controls in a web application?

Q: Is it OK to change the navigation of a website once users have logged in?

Q: What are the issues with disabling a browser’s navigation bar?

Q: I am looking for some clarification on best practice for “back to top” links: When should they be used and how? Jakob Nielsen is against them, but this is not a universally held view. They can be very useful for FAQs. What do you think?

Q: Are there any usability guidelines with respect to hyperlinks? In particular, the number of them on any given screen (for example, a page with 50 hyperlinks).

Q: I am the only Information Architect + Designer in an IT Solutions company. I am also fresh out of college. How can I introduce some processes to work with the programmers / coders who are working on Enterprise Solutions?

Q: When evaluating a web site, what is the correct process to create tasks for a user test?

Q: Breadcrumb trails seem to be common navigation aids. But in which ways and how often are they really used? Is it enough to rely only on the breadcrumb trail to tell the user where she is in the site hierarchy (for example when she arrives via a deep link), or do you still need to do that with headings, etc.?

‍Q: Our web-based application currently requires two logins to use: one for the application and one for each module under the application. I’m having trouble convincing others on the team that we should just have one login. What do you think?

Q: The web team at our company wants me to figure out the best way to add a 6th level of navigation to our website. Is the best way to do this to add this level of navigation sub-nested under the 5th level on the left-hand side of the page?

Ideally, conduct usability studies on both the user interface and the documentation to help you define and prioritize problems with both. The data you gather will help you to measure the benefits in terms of business metrics for both the UI and the documentation.

If management isn’t implementing changes based on usability tests, they might not be convinced of the value of the data you’ve collected.

This post explores Alternative Investments: Part 1

This post explores Alternative Investments: Part 3

This post explores saving time and money with wireframes.

This post explores UX Design for Data Products

Iconixx legacy code base and user experience once cutting edge had become dated. They were concerned that the dated look and lack of mobile options could make them vulnerable.

An all-in-one solution for lab process management.

OpenDoor Trading was creating a brand new product that needed to be innovative. However the trading community had long held expectations about how trading interfaces behave and low tolerance for traditional user studies and adopting new usability paradigms.

Drilling through narrow beds of hydrocarbons isn’t easy. Expero designed the user experience for a complex data-driven analytics package in just three months, enabling implementation for a time-sensitive customer.

Expero designed a distributed high-performance computer and rendering system, enabling terabyte data to be interactively processed at 10 frames per second on existing compute clusters with users in a remote web browser-based reactive user experience.

Tasktop legacy client-server platform had a steep learning curve for deploying integrations. In addition to moving to the web, Tasktop wanted to enable a broader, less skilled user audience to configure and deploy integrations. Expero created a novel user experience for the new web-based platform that has far exceeded Tasktop’s user adoption goals!

myHouseby’s goal is to give their customers the ability to design their dream house from scratch in a matter of minutes. Expero delivered a streamlined design and user friendly application to make new home construction easier than it has ever been.