ui / ux • June 2017
Akamai Technologies is the global leader in Content Delivery Network (CDN) services, making the Internet fast, reliable and secure for its customers. In 2012, Akamai launched a redesigned web portal to help users configure settings and monitor assets relating to their Akamai services. However, throughout its years of evolution, the portal began to have more and more issues with consistency and was in need of a visual refresh.
Akamai control center portal has always been a place to get work done, but as more features were added, using the portal became more work.
Our challenge was to figure out how to improve the users’ experience and help them focus their work, get informed about statuses, and act on their tasks.
In this project, my responsibilities were to interpret wireframes into high-fidelity mockups, create interactive prototypes for annual customer conference presentations, and collaborated with other UX designer to define common patterns (navigation, headers, UIs) for the entire portal.
Navigation
We simplified the original navigation by removing context-sensitive list items and by adding an always-on sidebar navigation. This change gave users the ability to navigate to quickly navigate in any screen, helping users gain confidence.
Consistency
During the redesign of the portal, we spent a lot of time coming up with a design system to quickly create standardized UI components and page layouts in order to create a consistent user’s experience.
Focus
The start page was completely redesigned with the focus of helping users quickly jump into their tasks. We tested several different layouts to make sure that multiple user personas would benefit.
The new control center and start page are currently in beta with the first few customers. Based on the feedback we received during our annual customer conference, the redesign is seen as a great success.
Our team is continuing to work with different product teams to make sure that their services can be properly ported over to the new control center to provide users with a greatly enhanced user experience.
