Explore our thinking

It starts innocently enough. You need a database connection string and to know which tables are safe to cache, and there’s just no sense in putting that in your source code. Right? I mean, why put hard-coded stuff in your programming language?

In this third post we look at how the application’s graph data fit into another property graph database: Titan.

Especially early in product development, small custom-built datasets are the order of the day.

In this second post we look at how the application’s graph data fit into a leading graph database: Neo4j. Quite well actually.

Most development is feature driven. A developer is on the line to complete a user story or functional requirement, and even if the application gets a little slower, she’d rather have a demo to show during sprint review, instead of watching every one else’s demo.

We talk about data, and how several data concepts such as “Big Data” and “NoSQL” are currently in the vogue. But just as all politics is local, all data is ultimately specific to its own subject domain. Data is not all the same, and so we shouldn’t expect that the general data tools will be the best tools when working with any particular set of data. Choose the right tools with the best fit for your data and you’ll spend more time in analysis and realizing the value of your data, and less time working around the restrictions of your tools.

Every distributed system eventually requires messages to be written on the wire to be transmitted from one machine to another. In many cases these messages are hidden magic. Using WCF web services, or Thrift RPC, code-generated proxies make remote calls look like function calls.

How many times has a customer come and told you your product was “slow”? In this multi-part series, we will discuss how “slow” happens, and how you can fix it.

We were working with a potential client a few weeks ago, trying to figure out if we could help them improve some seismic processing software. The software had excellent science under the covers, but the visual interface was old and tired. Could Palladium help rejuvenate their user experience? Old looking software can imply old or out of date capabilities. Could we make it, well, better?

Implementing this new logic “the declarative way” is an interesting and typical example of how we use Knockout and Rx to capture the logic and business rules in declarative statements that just work and avoid the complex logic you’d need to implement this functionality imperatively.

Unit of measure conversions are a constant concern in scientific code. Most well written scientific domain kernels should be unit un-aware because the equations of nature are generally unit invariant: momentum is mass times velocity whether velocity is in meters per second or furlongs per fortnight. But there are always important places where the actual values matter: water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Therefore one typically assumes a set of canonical units in the computational domain to make the programming more straightforward. It’s also more efficient and numerically stable to only translate units on the boundaries of the computation domain, rather than littering them throughout.

Recently I was working on a GUI that walked the user through a series of 5 steps in a Workflow. The user would spend most of their time on the 3rd step. As the user made edits, those edits would immediately be sent to the server for processing, and results from the server would show up in a different part of the GUI. There was a requirement that whenever the user left the 3rd step, we needed to send a message to the server to commit the changes they’d made.

When working with RxJs and Knockout, there will be times when you have an Rx Observable and need a Knockout observable so you can bind it to a view. And there will be times when you have a Knockout observable and need an Rx Observable so you can merge several event sources or some other type of logic that is more easily solved by the RxJs linq operators.

When writing a complex single page web application, you find yourself dealing with A LOT of asynchronous activities. The user is busy clicking on UI elements and typing in text boxes. Asynchronous requests and responses are flitting back and forth between the server and client. Perhaps you’ve even got asynchronous messages coming from web workers.

Up until recently, Firefox was the only Windows 7 browser which had support for multitouch. In a recent build, Chrome has also added experimental support. Unsurprisingly, they’ve used the same touch model used by mobile safari.

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:

There’s an old standby which tells us that A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems.

Today I had the lovely experience of being told “the network to the cluster is down” while I was writing some code that was supposed to use the cluster. Was I stalled? How could I test my logic? It turns out we’re rather obsessive about separating interface from implementation, usually via C# interface definitions. In this case, I just went down the road I was going down anyway: making some simple mock objects to model the cluster dependencies. (We use Moq.) Now I don’t really care that the network is down.

In the kind of programming we do — scientific simulations and decision support — modeling is usually the first task, and often the hardest. Structuring your problem the right way can make all the difference in determining whether future code is graceful or spaghetti-like.

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.

Back in the 1990s, if you wanted to interview a C++ programmer, you’d ask him to write a string class. My programming homework counted words or wrote versions of grep(1). Perl made one form of regular expressions popular with the masses.That’s what you cut your teeth on. Now most every language you learn to program in has a Unicode-compliant standard string library which most people don’t think much about anymore. For most of us, it’s a solved problem. (Though there are fun exceptions.)

Q: I’m designing the UI for an application, and people here have different ideas about what this product should do. How am I supposed to design when I don’t know what I’m designing?

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: How can we optimize our site content for search engines but make sure it’s usable for people, too?

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: Is it important that users be able to get to any content in a website within 3 clicks?

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: Which is better – long scrolling pages, or short pages that don’t scroll?

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.

A Content Style Guide provides rules and examples for how content should be crafted and presented to users, and will ensure that your messaging is consistent and effective.

Expero + Pebble turn global signals into AI-powered insights so digital wealth firms can stand out, engage users, and scale faster.

Tailored anomaly detection with customizable workflows and unified event view. Seamlessly integrates with major financial crime tools.

Visualize insights effortlessly with customizable dashboards. Empower data-driven decisions. Compatible with Power BI, Tableau, and more.

Create and view alerts easily with drag-and-drop ML, AI, and Graph algorithms. Aggregate alerts from 3rd party and internal solutions.

Create a unified customer view with drag-and-drop alerts and ML/AI analytics. Perform onboarding, remediation, due diligence, and monitoring.

Create a unified customer view with drag-and-drop alerts and ML/AI analytics. Perform onboarding, remediation, due diligence, and monitoring.

Gain a complete 360-degree customer view with our advanced integration solution. Utilize cutting-edge graph and fuzzy matching algorithms to seamlessly connect, enrich, and reveal valuable customer connections from any data source.

We are delighted to be a partner with Morningstar, as a Premium Service Delivery Partner. Through this relationship, Expero will be helping Morningstar customers make best use of the wide range of data available to them from Morningstar.

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.

Use machine learning to forecast crop growth.

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!

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.

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.

Can you predict and plan for the flu? Expero built a data product including a long term forecast for modeling the spread of influenza-like illness across the United States using a cutting edge deep learning model.

Bringing Visibility to a Complex Data Lake

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.

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

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.

How has the storage reservoir of CO2 changed over time?

This post explores What is a Data Product?

This post explores UX Design for Data Products

This post explores transportation, auto, and infrastructure.

This post explores Supernodes

This post explores SAP | APO Lightning Talk

This post explores saving time and money with wireframes.

This post explores Model Interpretability

This post explores Merge vs Rebase in Git

This post explores Machine Learning for Supply Chain & Logistics

This post explores Machine Learning For Structured Finance.

This post explores Machine Learning For Supply Chain

This post explores Machine Learning For Oil & Gas (Part 2)

This post explores Machine Learning For Oil & Gas (Part 1)

This post explores Machine Learning CI/CD Pipelining

This post explores ML Ops

This post explores Local vs Remote Repositories in Git

This post explores Linear Regression in Machine Learning

This post explores Keeping Humans in the Machine Learning Loop

This post explores how humans and machine learning can interact with one another.

This post explores Graph For Supply Chain

This post explores Graph For IoT

This post explores Entitlements

This post explores Bond Trading Platform Software.

This post explores Deploying Machine Learning Systems

This post explores Alternative Investments: Part 3

This post explores Apache Kafka 101

This post explores Alternative Investments: Part 2