Equinix Marketplace UX Design
Equinix Marketplace UX Design
SUMMARY
I created dozens of wireframes of new features and pages (including the homepage) for the Equinix Marketplace, a portal that allows enterprise customers to discover new partners and locations. I also designed mockups for a new Marketplace mobile app that were used to guide development. My final project presentation won 2nd place out of 74 interns in a panel including the current CEO.
Problem:
Equinix Marketplace still featured the original design from seven years ago. The homepage greeted users with irrelevant information, hid important data and forced users to use separate apps to accomplish tasks. Finally, the design and usability of the Marketplace portal was severely in need of a refresh.
(No real data shown) The left screen shows the old Marketplace homepage. The right shows my concept of a homepage specific to internal Account Managers, featuring an account summary dashboard and account-specific opportunities.
My role:
My role was to bring an outside perspective and reimagine a new design and features to simplify Marketplace and make it an engaging product. This meant meeting with a variety of team members and senior staff to determine relevant new features and design constraints, then quickly building wireframes, sharing and getting feedback. While the Marketplace team had to spend their time on implementing more incremental features, my job was to envision more large-scale changes for the product roadmap several development cycles ahead of production.
Process:
The first few weeks of my time at Equinix were spent learning about the platform and users. Marketplace is used by a wide array of users including Equinix sales teams, account managers and external network architects and networking sales staff.
Although interconnection was a new field for me, I knew that users would expect Marketplace to work with the same fluidity and simplicity as other online platforms. I researched other online analogous services like LinkedIn, Airbnb and Amazon, then translated elements of these well-honed designs to improve the Marketplace experience and give users clear options about next steps.
This prototype shows movement between an external user's home screen and several options on the dashboard-style homepage. The goal of the new homepage was to show relevant data to users immediately instead of making them open separate apps to get insights.
Homepage Redesign:
As the newcomer on the team, I tried to frequently get ideas onto paper and in front of more experienced team members. Although the team agreed that the homepage needed a redesign, different product managers, designers and senior staff had different visions. Some people wanted a Facebook-style timeline, while others wanted to maintain the current content content blocks.
One morning, I quickly sketched out three different designs encapsulating combinations of different visions for the homepage, and shared with several people on the team. After the ideas were visual, the team reached consensus on a general direction for the page. I proceeded to meet and brainstorm regularly with the lead product manager, mock up our visions and share with the rest of the team until we agreed on a final version.
Storefronts are currently static blocks of text lacking relevant company data or recommendations. This conception of storefronts involves an interactive tab structure and timeline-based interconnection map, in addition to showing similar companies and locations below.
Mobile App:
During my summer internship, the Marketplace team decided to move forward with a brand-new mobile app for the portal. We needed to deliver detailed feature specs and use cases to the Sinapore-based development team, so I built a series of prototypes to visually communicate the product features and functionality.
I worked with the lead product manager to brainstorm ideas for the app, then quickly built high-fidelity wireframes to gain approval of features from senior staff and show to the rest of the team. After several weeks of dedicated mobile app work, I presented to the Sinapore team, who are using the mockups to design a final version of the app.
App screens for a homepage for customers, a homepage for internal users, and an account summary page.
Ecosystem Visualizer tool, Company storefront page, search filters and "My Company" summary dashboard.
The mobile app and homescreen redesign projects gave me practice gathering use cases and quickly building interactive mockups to green-light features with senior staff. The most challenging part of the project was designing ahead of developers, thus not recieving as much feedback on feasibility as I would have liked. I also had to work within limits of what current API's would allow (e.g. a limited search). However, I discovered the power of interactive mockups to show a product's functional value and enjoyed the creativity used to define features at an early stage in the development process.
Skills I Learned at Equinix:
- Sketch & InVision software
- Rapid UX prototyping
- Agile Development Process
- Presenting ideas to senior project managers
- Oracle BI data analysis
