Loading work...
Equinix had a working MVP for SmartView, the DCIM tool that lets enterprise customers monitor server hardware remotely instead of on-site, but the product had no shared system to grow into. The studio shaped the MVP into a modular section system covering environmental, power, mechanical, electrical, alarms, and alerts, with requirements mapping, sitemap, user flows, and full section-by-section visual design. SmartView ships today as part of Equinix deployment support for global B2B customers.
Joined mid-stream after the MVP was already approved. Re-mapped requirements visually, reviewed competitor DCIMs, and rebuilt baseline documentation that had been lost on handover.
The user is a data center technician whose quote sets the tone: "When it comes to running a data center, there is no downtime." Every section was built around alerting, real-time data, and off-site access rather than dwell-time or engagement. The product is not something people come to use, it is something they check because something is wrong.
Design joined after the MVP had been signed off, but baseline documentation had been lost on handover. Requirements were re-mapped visually and competitor DCIMs were reviewed before a single screen was touched, so the redesign started from a legible picture of what the product actually was.
MVP-era feedback showed users wanted real-time trends front and center on environmental, power, mechanical, and electrical. Tabbed table views were moved beneath the trend views, and reports sections were stripped out entirely because the data they repeated was already answered by the live trend.
Environmental, power, mechanical, and electrical all answer the same shape of question: what is happening now, what happened in the last 24 hours, which assets are involved. The redesign encoded that as a shared section template (trend front, filters above, table underneath) so every module reads the same.
Treating each section as a module made later sections faster to design and faster to build. The shared grid system that came out of SmartView was a replacement grid for the broader Equinix product line, not just one app. Work compounded outside its own scope.
An alarm in a data center is the reason someone opened the product. The smart banner was designed to persist across every section until cleared, so a technician who navigated away from dashboard to power still sees the unacknowledged fault. Alarms were given a first-class section with severity, assignee, and time-to-ack as the primary columns.
SmartView serves both direct Equinix customers and resellers operating on behalf of their own customers. The information architecture and section template were built so both views share the same template, with scoping rather than forks, which kept the product legible without doubling the surface area.
The grid system designed for SmartView replaced the previous Equinix product grid that earlier internal apps had been built on. The deliverable extended past the case: a pattern asset the rest of the product line could adopt.
SmartView redesigned from MVP into a modular DCIM product.
A full redesign shipped across every major section of SmartView, with a shared module system that replaced prior Equinix grids. SmartView remains live as part of Equinix's deployment support offering today.