Equinix
A complex B2B buying journey for network administrators and operators.
Refreshing a complex product portfolio with a unified, platform-first approach.
As the global leader in internet connection and data centers, Equinix quite literally powers the Internet. Orium partnered with Equinix to create a more unified, platform-oriented experience for their customers across a number of products, while at the same time helping their teams to evolve their internal digital practices and processes.
Expertise required for this project
- Design research
- UX strategy & design operations
- Interface & user experience design
- User testing & analysis
- Custom JavaScript applications
- Agile software development
The Challenge
Equinix is the global leader in colocated data centers and internet connection— both in terms of sheer numbers and by having one of the most robust, reliable networks to have ever existed. With a complex core business offering and a customer base with a broad range of needs and use cases, Equinix wanted to refine their platform experience across a number of projects to create a more intuitive approach to discovering, acquiring, and monitoring their industry leading services.
Initially, Orium was approached by the Interconnection group at Equinix to focus on a single product—Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX)—to redesign and develop the portal, creating an experience that facilitated easy understanding for customers who need to procure, modify, and monitor global network connectivity services.
As the project evolved, the Interconnection team expanded their efforts across other categories, bringing Orium in to assist with their Internet Exchange (IX) and International Business Exchange Smartview (IBX) products as well and taking advantage of the potential in revitalizing all three with a more platform-focused view. By building on pattern libraries and establishing a unified vision for the customer experience, Orium was able to connect the disparate Equinix Interconnection streams together, setting them up for integration into the broader Equinix digital customer experience.
Equinix embraced the opportunity to implement a truly platform-forward approach, refreshing a complex and technical product portfolio into a unified, digital-first experience.
The Strategy
Working closely with the Equinix team to evolve a cohesive approach to tackling challenges was the first and most important piece to get right. By partnering directly with them—including embedding Orium team members with Equinix’s internal teams—we were able to refine customer journeys and product and design practices in a way that joined existing Equinix work styles with industry best practices brought in by the Orium team. Together, Orium and Equinix were able to build the process infrastructure required to bring a consistent experience to customers, regardless of the type of networking or interconnectivity services they were procuring.
A comprehensive style guide for an array of Equinix products.
Equinix has a complex suite of services they offer their customers, but the highly technical nature of those services means it can be especially difficult for new customers to understand and grasp the nuances of their offers. It was clear from the get-go that any solutions we built would need to first and foremost make the daunting world of data connection more approachable and understandable for Equinix audiences.
To achieve our goals, Orium had to quickly become experts on the topic of internet connections and data centres, as well as on Equinix itself. By leveraging our past experience working with the telecommunications and networking technology sectors, we were able to ensure we had a complete picture of the complexity of Equinix’s offers and could hit the ground running with their teams. And in understanding not only the services offered, but also the provider, we were able to ensure any process refinements were grounded in what made sense for the Equinix teams not just during the projects, but into the future.
The Solution
01
EQUINIX CLOUD EXCHANGE FABRIC
ECX
Beginning with ECX, Orium was focused on delivering a seamless customer experience that clarified the most confusing elements of the portal for customers and gave them a more friction-free configuration and purchasing experience.
After conducting customer research, one key area for reducing friction became clear: infrequent customers, who were struggling to understand all the elements at play in the portal. Regular customers of the portal understood where to find what they needed, but infrequent customers struggled to extract even the most basic information (and even regular customers struggled when looking for new things).
The Orium team worked to create a system that highlights the most important service capabilities and features, putting them front and centre to make them easy to find for customers. By making the experience more approachable, customers are able to get started with greater ease and see the ways they could make even better use of the portal.
One key improvement Orium made was introducing network topology diagrams, which offer customers a clear visual picture of the network services they have procured. The more readable format for understanding networks and navigating the portal made for a more digestible and enjoyable experience for customers overall, allowing Equinix to focus on more specific pain points to optimize the experience for frequent customers.
Because the Orium team also did development for this project, onboarding the Equinix development team was a crucial part of the project’s success. Ensuring their internal development team was fully trained in how to manage the portal back-end and that sufficient knowledge share had happened prior to launch for their team to support the functionality of the portal going forward was an ongoing aim of the project.
Bringing together design, development, and product management in a more agile approach to project work was not just a crucial component to the initial delivery and the ongoing support of the ECX portal, but to the spate of projects Orium and Equinix have worked on to date.
02
INTERNET EXCHANGE
IX
For IX, the team focused their energies on understanding what brought customers to the portal and using that information to determine the ways they could adjust the experience in a few key areas to bring greater clarity and ease to customers. Crucially, they homed in on what the “jobs to be done” were.
Orium discovered that a wide range of customers were only coming to the portal for a quarterly check-in or worse, to validate or corroborate when their own tools were telling them there was a problem. Few customers understood that the data available in the portal could be used to streamline their own processes, which would save them money and create better traffic flows with just a few simple tweaks.
Having unearthed these challenges, the team set out to accomplish two things: First, to make the portal landing experience more customer-friendly, so customers could get the information they need quickly and understand which were the most important pieces of information without having to sift through a lot of additional data. And secondly, to showcase opportunities customers were missing out on by not understanding the data they could see.
Instead of the portal being a place for reactivity, Orium focused on creating an experience that would allow customers to be proactive. We created a more intuitive experience by enhancing the design, improving information clarity, and streamlining navigation. We also created a more assistive experience that makes suggestions for opportunities customers may be missing— from additional peering to port upgrades—that can save customers money and assist them in doing their own jobs better.
Orium created an experience for Equinix that went beyond smoothing out rough edges, leveraging data to make the portal more assistive for customers. The redesigned IX portal creates real value for Equinix customers and by centering the information presented around the real business needs of customers, while also creating insight and value for Equinix itself.
Working closely with the internal teams to create repeatable design processes for future work on IX, Orium was able to continue folding in more Agile approaches with the Equinix development and product teams.
03
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS
EXCHANGE SMARTVIEW
IBX
For IBX Smartview, the team tackled another new challenge: bringing to light opportunities within Equinix’s own operations to increase efficiencies in their data centre management.
What makes the IBX portal different is that it doesn’t just provide customers with information about their data transfer and networking solutions, it exposes information about key factors in maintaining those solutions efficiently through power usage monitoring. These insights don’t just help customers ensure their systems are operating as expected, but they are a key to Equinix’s own management of their data centres.
With a thoughtfully redesigned portal, Orium created an easy way for Equinix to monitor and compare systems across all 200+ data centres they have around the world. The level of granularity in these insights is impressive: Equinix can note where something as small as a single fan in one room is working harder than the average and how that inefficiency could be creating problems or costing big money across the system.
To create the assistive experience Equinix was looking for, Orium made two major changes. The first was to shift from two separate portals—one for internal, one for external—to a single, unified portal. This change provided immediate improvements to the work experience for their own teams. With only one code base to maintain, developers can now focus on maintaining a seamless experience for all customers, instead of splitting their focus and fracturing their ability to make meaningful improvements. And customer experience teams have an easier time now too, as any issues that arise are easily replicated by customer service, since all parties now have the same view.
The second major improvement the Orium team made was the creation of a customizable dashboard, one that put the power of oversight directly into the hands of the customers. With an easy to configure, easy to understand dashboard, customers (both customers and Equinix internal managers) are able to showcase the data and information from the portal that’s most important to them, giving them a robust view for monitoring assets easily. In addition, the IBX Overview page gives immediate insight into any issues that need to be addressed, showing a heads up display that means customers don’t have to dig to find out what’s going on in their networks.
Outcomes & Next Steps
With the successful launch of three redesigned and reconfigured portal properties for Equinix that offer greater clarity for customers in finding, surfacing, and interpreting the data available to them, Orium has started Equinix down a path to a cohesive, platform-focused experience.
On top of improved experiences for customers, the ongoing engagements have created new processes that will continue to pay dividends for internal teams down the line with continued refinement of the design and product process.
As the team works in faster, more incremental change cycles, and by looking across the totality of the customer journey, the team will be able to create a platform-wide understanding of not only who they are dealing with, but also how to serve them best at every step of the journey.
The Orium team approached its work with great expertise. The experience of working with them has been second-to-none.
