Equinix
Data Cloud Platform
Project Name: Equinix Customer Portal Redesign
Role: Head of Design (CX)
Challenge: Redesign Legacy to be responsive, develop a design system, and build with reusable react components.
Duration: 2 Years
Equinix provides secure data storage facilities, space, and internet exchanges to enable interconnection. My role as a customer experience design lead was to help our team develop product heuristics and coherency for the design team and for the development team.
Phase 1: Exploratory Design Spikes
Duration: 3-4 months
Workshops are is the cornerstone to any product design teams process. These week long sprints included designers, devs, and POs and PMs in order to explore blue sky concepts for what the product could look like at a high level.
Example of z-space panel, drawer and modal elevation.
Example of a cross functional design sprint - voting on dashboard filters
Phase 2: Research
Researching patterns and design studies were a big part of the job. We read and collected existing HCI research and user studies that help inform our decisions. In addition we also had ongoing workshops and design sprints where we could share our inspirations and examples of work happening out in the wild.
This is an example of some design study documentation around our network visualization.
Phase 3: Establish a Style and Guidelines
Duration: 6-9 months
Developed a bible of components logic, usage, and styling that could be used to build our living style guide and drive the look and feel of our products components.
Just a snapshot of the many pages that make up a style guide.
Phase 4: Layout and Wireframes
Duration: 9-12 months
Wireframes and Taskflows can start as a sketch or on a white board but then is translated into a black and white prototypes and wire-flows with annotations that follow a proscribed user task.
We split up the design team into vertical domains. Each team had a pm, a dev, and a designer working together on wireframes and workflows.
My responsibility was to oversee the coherence of each teams work as the moved towards development. We established a sprint cadence and review process in order to meet milestones and quarterly deadlines.
Phase 4: High Res Mockups
Duration: 4-6 weeks
I would make key screens and applied styling to them to show how they should look when built. These helped establish confidence in the style guide and how the sum of all these parts would live together as a system.
The launch took a little over 2 years but it was a absolute success and the team was one of the best groups of designers, engineers, and product management ive had the privilege to work with. Here is the result of all of our hard work: