Fully Managed, globally scalable database service at the Edge

About

Equinix is the world’s largest IBX data center & colocation provider, offering the fastest application performance, lowest latency routes worldwide and a digital ecosystem for financial, content or rich-media, enterprise, and cloud networks. Equinix connects the world’s leading businesses to their customers, employees and partners inside the world’s most connected data centers in 44 markets across five continents. In the United States, Equinix operates data centers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Silicon Valley and Washington D.C.

MilleniumDB is a fuly managed, globally distributed, horizontally scalable, strongly consistent SQL+NoSQL database at the edge, delivered as-a-service. Customers can run their applications at Equinix, or in public clouds connected via low-latency private links. They will be able to ingest data at global data availability zones proximate to their data sources. As a result, customers can drastically simplify database operations, easily develop geo-distributed applications and achieve GDPR compliance.

Goal

Create a unified, consistent user experience for the service based on Equinix Style Guide

Add simple and fast workflow for connection to the cloud

Guide user's journey and provide needed information for setup

Create a clear and recognizable logo that can be used as an icon

Create marketing materials to promote new service

Solution

Unified and consistent color scheme, typography, UI elements and behavior patterns

Consistent user flow direction

Split operation into steps and group accordingly to actions

Prepopulate information where possible to prevent user from repeated typing and possible user errors

Simplified, structured landing page with clear steps and calls to action

Remarkably easy-to-recognize logo

My Role

During my work on the project, I created information architecture, designed the user flows, and created multiple iterations of low-fidelity wireframes that were developed into high-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes. I was able to create a clear hierarchy and structure for the website, visualized the most important data in charts and cards with notifications, maps with datacenter locations and connected nodes on the dashboard. By splitting configurable information into steps for the "settings and configuration" page, and making optional information accessible only when selected simplified the user experience during database connection or making network modifications. I worked closely with engineers to ensure that solutions can be implemented with fast loading time; worked to speed up processes and enrich the provided mockups with style guides and CSS for UI element design. I created a marketing page that customers could access for an introduction, trials and subscriptions. The page had calls to action in multiple places that increased user engagement, and provided clear, structured information about the service and installation process. The page included designs based on different devices: desktop, tablets, and mobile phones.

Logo & Banner

After multiple iterations, the current logo was chosen to be used for the product development stage. The logo used corporate colors and font to align the design with other corporate products. The logo combined the project meaning as a globally distributed and scalable database. The logo is designed to be used as an icon or product name in development stage. A banner was made to promote the new Beta release, and was shared with trusted customers. The banner is a well-designed idea of a global distributed database scaled throughout the world.

Result

The new database product page had widespread positive reactions and actionable responses from users. The logo was simple to recognize and understand the meaning of at a glance. The new design and flow of connection and network settings made the user experience much simpler, faster and with less typing.

Used Tools