Equinix is the world’s leading digital infrastructure company and our customers include some of the biggest tech companies such as Meta, Google Cloud, AWS, Netflix, Spotify etc. Our colocation products (ie, data centres) are the physical assets of what is the majority of the internet traffic. As such, the core of our customers are network specialists and chief technology officer (ie advanced technical users) who come to the customer portal to perform tasks such as ordering a service, resolving colocation or services issues, and/or granting user permission on enterprise network, etc.
The catalog was proposed to help our customers learn more about the full suite of Equinix’s products, see the pricing model of each product, and drive higher quality conversations between our Sales team and customers. It is focused on enabling our customers to find the right products that suit their connectivity needs.
Our data from Amplitude shows that there is a high drop-off rate at the point when our product calculates the cost of the set-up before completing a purchase. This suggests that customers create a mock order in order to see prices before making a decision to buy a product.
Today, there is no easy way to browse our products without engaging Sales and time is lost compiling information from different sources.
The UX team held a design thinking workshop to engage senior leaders and discussed possible solutions. The conclusion of the workshop was a catalog that contains services and solutions that address industry needs and channel partners within Equinix ecosystem.
In the interim, a product catalog is necessary to provide a single pane of all our product offerings.
I led a team with this idea in the Hackathon 2022. There are 4 of us in the team (UX designer - me + 3 full-stacked engineers).
I was in charge of performing data analytics to show demand for the product, competitive analysis of similar products in the market, research on the top 5 products of Equinix, wireframes of catalog, user-testing, high-fidelity prototypes, video production, graphics and presentation to leadership.
“Jacob’s law states that users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
With that in mind, I kicked off the project with some insights from a competitive analysis of other B2B cloud products (Google Cloud and AWS) and B2C e-commerce websites (Amazon, Apple, Lazada and Shopee). The rationale is to learn from the biggest players their successes and whether there’s any room for improvement.
Given the majority of our customers are not familiar with the categories of our products, the engineering team and I saw value in having a guided questionnaire that behaves as filters for our catalog.
On the catalog page, this questionnaire begins by addressing the needs of the customers and following up with 2 (optional) questions to help filter out more products. In the end, the users are not faced with 20 different product cards but only 2-3 options.
On another note, this catalog was built using the new Equinix Design System, Quix. As we move away from legacy design, it’s important that I collaborate closely with the Quix team so that there isn’t any thrown-away effort from the engineering team and that my design is compliant with Quix’s governance.
On the product description page, I grouped the content into small digestible sections and illustrations are spread across the page to reduce cognitive load.
Call-to-Action buttons are available as either buttons or text links within the content. The secondary CTA “Add to Solution Builder” allows customers to further configure the connectivity on a canvas before completing an order - a behaviour similar to “Add to Cart” on e-commerce sites.
Last but most importantly, a pricing model at the bottom of the page lets customers decide how much or little of the connectivity is needed based on their enterprise needs.
If they are interested to learn more about the product, video tutorials and resources are available after the pricing section. This will take them to a repository of Equinix product information where they can watch how other customers find solutions in similar products.
At the end of flow, I created a form that lets potential customers reach out to Equinix Sales team. Our sales specialists will then have a better understanding of where to begin their conversations with the customers. The customers no longer have to search for their Equinix contacts on the support page in order to speak to Sales.
This concludes the product catalog user flow from the customer portal to the Sales team. As the Solution Builder is still in beta phase, the Sales team remains the point of contact for potential customers for now.
As this was my first B2B product, I was overwhelmed by the complexity of Equinix products at first. However, given time and working with an amazing team of engineers and UX colleagues, I managed to gather a lot of feedback on my design and honed my skills as a designer. I could not have done this without the support I received from my own UX team. I want to thank my UX manager, Kay, for her guidance on how to manage certain stakeholders and UX researcher, Fiona, for her valuable insights on our customer behaviour. Last but not least, a special shout-out to the engineers (pictured below) who worked tirelessly with me and are so patient with my endless questions.
