Equinix

Equinix Customer Portal redesign

The portal is where Equinix customers order and manage everything in their data centers: new services, smart hands, work visits, users, reports and billing. I led its redesign across seven major releases.

Role: Senior UX designer, design lead for the portal
Timeline: Jul 2015 – Oct 2017
Scope: 80+ features on responsive web
Outcome: Users grew from 80K to 140K

Redesigned Equinix Customer Portal dashboard

My role

I led the blue-sky designs, user research, competitive analysis, analytics review, requirements gathering, information architecture, sprint planning, prototyping and build reviews. I was solely responsible for redesigning navigation, information architecture, user management, global search, the activity center, and orders and forms.

As a player-coach, I also helped scale the design team and established a unified design system that product and engineering could build on.

Discovery

We interviewed internal and external users with a structured script, on site and remotely, and set up a survey to keep feedback coming. Google Analytics showed us the portal’s strengths and weaknesses, and its most-used workflows. Then we brought stakeholders and subject-matter experts together to audit the portal and find workflows we could simplify or template.

Remote customer interview with notes — Customer interviews, with notes captured live.

Wall of sticky notes from a stakeholder workshop — Stakeholder workshops audited every workflow.

Vision and strategy

Discovery turned into four principles that every release was measured against.

Customer focus

Design with a customer mindset, drop internal jargon, communicate after booking, and show prices and dates while ordering.

Usability

Better guidance, more mobile functionality, predictive search, and intuitive layouts and workflows.

Simplicity

Concise descriptions and help text, fewer fields, and no duplicate entry.

Internal productivity

Fewer order kick-backs, less manual QA, and one place for customers to do everything.

Design

Each area of the portal went through its own workshop. Navigation, for example, started with a wall of every task customers perform. I mapped user flows for each workflow, such as adding and managing users, before designing screens, and ran blue-sky and comparative studies to build the pattern library.

Team arranging sticky notes for navigation — A navigation workshop.

Flow diagram for user management — User flow for user management.

Map of the portal’s areas and tasks — The portal, mapped by area.

Before and after

Each image shows the new design on the left and the old one on the right.

Submitted orders, new and old — Submitted orders.

User management, new and old — User management.

Notifications, new and old — Notifications.

Outcome

Over two years and seven major releases, the portal’s user base grew from 80K to 140K, and order growth rose from 55% to 68%.

80K → 140Kportal users
55% → 68%order growth
7major releases

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