Equinix

Equinix is a global data center and interconnection company. We built the UX foundation for the admin console its customers use to provision and manage edge infrastructure, from persona research and user flows to the information architecture and wireframes for every screen, handed to a separate team for the final UI.

The work sat on the customer administration area, the self-service control panel, not the public marketing site. We started with persona research to understand who actually operates this console: the infrastructure and platform engineers who provision servers and databases, and the account admins who manage users, security and billing across a company’s projects. From that research we defined the personas and the jobs each one needed the console to support.

We then mapped the user flows and the information architecture for the whole product: the bare metal servers module (Edge Metal), the managed database service (MillenniumDB), security keys (Smart Key), identity and access management (IAM) and billing. The core of the work was the long, multi-step tasks. Provisioning and deploying a server runs across server, network, security group, review and billing. Creating a database universe runs across configuration, nodes and review. We designed those flows so each long task stayed clear, recoverable and easy to check before committing.

We wireframed every page and then took the design further, into interactive, high-fidelity mockups with real color, typography and data visualization: the dashboards and metrics charts, the list and detail views, the multi-step wizards, and their empty and error states. We assembled the screens into clickable prototypes so the whole product could be tried as a working flow, and handed the set to a separate firm that produced the final production UI. This was a 2019 engagement, and our part ran from research through the designed, interactive mockups.