Deploy.Equinix
The Goal
During my time as a developer intern at Equinix my team was tasked with creating an informational site available to Equinix current customers. On this website lives information and instructions available for all applications available to Equinix customers. You can see the live site here.
Problem
Equinix customers launched their virtual servers and would love them, initially. However, when we sent the customers a six-month satisfaction survey, 72% of customers globally said they had either moved to another cloud provider or they were not satisfied with their experience.
Solution
Our team was tasked with creating a page that contain high level knowledge and instructions for each offering provided by Equinix on their cloud provider platform.
Role
Frontend Developer Intern
Timeline
December 2022 - June 2023
Tools
Jira
Figma
Github - Markdown Language
Team
Four Developers (including me!)
One Product Manager
One Marketing Analyst
Setting Expectation
This project was a corporate work project and the end result shows a very professionally built interface. However, I only had one part of the entire website. As an intern, I was allowed to shadow the entire website but I could only contribute code to a few pieces.
I was able to take part in 100% of the research and design process.
Research
Our team wanted to create demand for this landing page by our customers, because we believed the page needed updating.
I recommended that our team construct an eight question survey to send to 400 current customers that have had Equinix servers for over six months.
Out of those 400 customers, we received 250 replies.
From those 250 replies, we received these results.
Design Process
We started the process of making this landing page by reading over the notes from site discussion meetings and combining what the customer wants from the site and what we want from the site.
The main piece of information that we gained from speaking directly with the customers is that a lot of the informational websites designed by developers have terrible user experience which makes it hard to understand the information.
We took this thought to heart.
We wrote down every possible action, piece of information, and instruction that this website should contain and dumped it into a Figma whiteboard.
I was tasked with taking this information and combining it and syphoning through it to create a site map that was easy to follow for the entire team.
With that information we were able to create a SiteMap for the page focusing on how to arrange the information in a way that doesn’t compromise the understanding or the user experience.
We used a joint Figma board to mock out each individual informational page and layout the "fake" information.
We wanted to internalize the customers requirement of a good user experience while still being informational.
We took these pages to several data server managers for their thoughts and got good feedback on the topics of information amount, instruction accuracy, and user interface. 92% of data server managers liked our changes and chose "highly satisfied" on all three topics.
The Process
Once we got the blueprint we worked on the markdown files that fed into the template of the website blueprint . My team used a github repository full of markdown files to create the Figma pages and put them on the website.
In order to achieve the goal that we laid out in the mock ups we created pull requests for each application page and assigned those pull requests to each developer on the team.
**I personally created the markdown files for the Juju, Pulumi, and Crossplane informational pages.
GitHub Branch copied here
