CLOUD-AS-A-SERVICE
Dell APEX
A portfolio-wide UX framework that helped enterprise buyers understand, compare, and evaluate Dell’s growing as-a-service portfolio.
Company
Dell Technologies
Role
Platform(s)
Responsive Web
Year
2021 - 2023
Context & Ownership
APEX marked Dell's shift from one-time hardware sales to subscription services. As the portfolio grew, independently owned pages created inconsistent structure, redundant messaging, and unclear differentiation between offers.
I led UX for 10+ product and offer experiences, working with research, product teams, and multiple business units. The work moved beyond page redesign into portfolio architecture, reusable templates, and a clearer evaluation journey.
The Design Challenge
What looked like a page-consistency problem was actually a portfolio architecture problem.
Distributed ownership
Each offer had separate business goals, roadmaps, and stakeholders.
Two audience depths
Executives needed outcomes while technical buyers needed architecture and risk detail.
Changing strategy
Offers were renamed, consolidated, and repositioned throughout the work.
CMS constraints
The framework needed to be modular and feasible inside an established system.
What I Did & Why
The work focused on a small set of system-level decisions that could improve the immediate experience while creating a stronger foundation for future growth
Map the full ecosystem
Grouped offers by category, buyer journey, and ownership to reveal redundancy and unclear boundaries.
Create a portfolio-first entry point
Shifted the homepage from brand introduction to a gateway into clear service categories.
Before - What wasn't working
After - A clearer starting point
Standardize offer architecture
Organized every page around overview, how it works, use cases, next steps, and resources.
Respect expert buyers
Used progressive disclosure and anchor navigation instead of forcing users through a marketing funnel.
Outcomes & Impact
60%+ growth
APEX subscriptions and annual recurring revenue grew 60%+ during my tenure.
10+ experiences
Designed product and offer experiences across Dell’s expanding as-a-service portfolio.
Long-term adoption
The shared page framework continued supporting launches after I transitioned off the project.
APEX taught me that the hardest design problems are often alignment problems. Research, clear system logic, and a framework that respects expert users made the work durable across teams and over time.
Keep scrolling for a deeper look at the research, iterations, decisions, and delivery behind the final experience.
My role
I led UX design for APEX product and offer experiences from 2021 to 2023. Working with a dedicated UX researcher, product managers, and teams across multiple business units, I helped define the portfolio architecture and created a reusable framework for how offers were organized and presented.
My work covered research synthesis, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, testing, and delivery.
Understanding the system
APEX was not a single product. It was a growing portfolio spanning cloud services, storage, compute, data protection, custom solutions, and industry use cases. Each area was owned by a different business unit with its own goals, messaging, and launch schedule.
As the portfolio expanded, those independently created experiences became harder to understand as a connected system. Similar offers were positioned differently, page structures varied, and users had no clear way to compare solutions.
Research showed that enterprise buyers did not need to be convinced of the value of cloud. They needed to understand what APEX offered, how its solutions differed, and which option fit their technical and business needs.
Goals and success signals
After identifying the structural problems, I aligned stakeholders around two groups of outcomes: helping enterprise buyers evaluate solutions and helping internal teams launch offers more consistently.
These goals defined what success looked like for the redesign and guided design decisions throughout the project.
Constraints and complexity
APEX was expanding inside an established enterprise environment. The solution needed to improve the buyer experience while accommodating organizational, technical, and strategic change.
Key constraints
Distributed ownership across business units
Each offer had its own roadmap, revenue goals, and stakeholders. Creating a shared experience required alignment across independently operating business units.
Marketing versus technical buyer tension
Marketing teams wanted to emphasize positioning and differentiation. Enterprise buyers needed architecture, integration, and risk information. The experience had to support both without overwhelming either audience.
Evolving product strategy
Offers changed scope, products were renamed, and portfolio structures shifted throughout the work. The framework needed to absorb those changes without becoming inconsistent.
Page fragmentation and redundant content
Offer pages had grown organically as the portfolio expanded. Similar solutions were framed as separate offers, messaging overlapped, and hierarchy varied across categories. Fragmentation had become a portfolio-level problem, not a page-level one.
CMS and engineering constraints
The redesign had to work within existing CMS capabilities and engineering capacity. Every pattern needed to be modular, reusable, and feasible to implement.
Early insight
What looked like a collection of inconsistent pages was actually a portfolio architecture problem. Improving individual pages would not be enough; we first needed to define how the portfolio worked as a connected system.
Design Challenge
How might we create a scalable framework that helps enterprise buyers evaluate APEX solutions while enabling multiple business units to launch offers consistently?
Platform structure and portfolio architecture
Before redesigning individual pages, I mapped the full APEX ecosystem across offer categories, buyer journeys, and business-unit ownership.
Mapping the ecosystem
The map made it possible to evaluate APEX as one connected portfolio instead of a collection of independently owned pages.
What we found
Similar services were positioned as separate offers without clear differentiation. Category boundaries were blurred, navigation did not match how buyers evaluated infrastructure, and there was no consistent hierarchy for comparing solutions.
Reframing the problem
Instead of refining pages independently, I reframed the work around three structural needs:
• Clear categories and relationships between offers
• A buyer journey connecting portfolio discovery to offer evaluation
• A reusable structure that could accommodate future launches and portfolio changes
This established the foundation for the homepage, portfolio navigation, and individual offer pages.
Understanding the APEX buyer experience
Before restructuring the APEX experience, we needed to understand how enterprise buyers evaluated cloud infrastructure and where the existing journey was breaking down.
Understanding the audience
Our research surfaced two primary evaluation styles:
Maria represented the autonomous technical evaluator. She typically arrived with a clear objective and wanted direct access to architecture, integration, and operational detail.
Tim represented the enterprise decision-maker. He needed to understand business value, credibility, and risk before engaging more deeply with a solution.
These were not completely separate audiences. A single buying decision could involve both needs at different stages, so the experience had to support quick business understanding as well as deeper technical evaluation.
What research told us
Research revealed problems across the entire APEX journey, not just individual offer pages:
Buyers struggled to understand what APEX offered and how similar solutions differed
The portfolio was difficult to discover from the main entry point
Repetitive marketing content made technical and evaluation information harder to find
Page structures varied, forcing buyers to relearn the experience from one offer to another
There was no clear path from understanding APEX to comparing solutions and evaluating a specific offer
How the research shaped the experience
The findings led to three connected design priorities:
Make the APEX portfolio visible earlier from the homepage
Clarify how categories and individual offers related to one another
Create a consistent offer-page structure that supported different levels of evaluation
Together, these priorities shaped the homepage, portfolio navigation, and individual offer experiences.
Designing the APEX product experience
With the portfolio architecture defined, I translated the strategy across three connected layers: the APEX homepage, portfolio navigation, and individual offer pages.
Redesigning the APEX entry point
The APEX homepage was the main entry point into the experience, but it functioned primarily as a marketing introduction. Buyers had to navigate deeper into the site before they could see what APEX actually offered.
Before - What wasn't working
The homepage prioritized brand messaging and competing marketing modules. The portfolio itself was difficult to discover.
After - A clearer starting point
The redesigned homepage surfaced the primary service categories directly on the page, giving buyers a clearer path into the portfolio.
Key design decisions
Reframed the homepage as an entry point into the APEX portfolio
Surfaced primary solution categories earlier in the experience
Reduced competing modules to prioritize product discovery
Created an entry structure that could accommodate future offers
Why this mattered?
Buyers could understand how APEX was organized and identify where to begin without first navigating through several layers of marketing content.
Organizing the APEX portfolio
The next step was defining how buyers would move from broad solution categories into individual offers without losing context. I organized related services into clearer categories and created a hierarchy connecting the homepage, portfolio, and offer pages.
Portfolio structure
From the homepage, users could enter the APEX portfolio through clearly defined solution categories. Each category represented a group of related services designed to address specific infrastructure needs.
Expanding into individual offers
Within each category, users could explore individual APEX services, moving from high level solution areas into specific offers while maintaining context within the broader portfolio.
Key design decisions
Grouped related services into clearly defined solution categories
Created a navigation model from homepage → portfolio → offer pages
Supported comparison and discovery between related solutions
Designed the structure to accommodate new offers, consolidations, and naming changes
Maintained context as buyers moved between portfolio levels
Why this mattered?
The new structure helped buyers understand how APEX services related to one another while giving internal teams a stable model that could accommodate ongoing portfolio changes.
Creating a scalable offer-page framework
With the homepage and portfolio structure defined, the final layer was creating consistency across the pages where buyers evaluated individual APEX offers. Previously, pages had been created independently by different business units. Structure, content depth, and calls to action varied depending on which offer a buyer was viewing.
I created a shared framework that gave buyers a predictable evaluation experience while remaining flexible enough to support different products and business requirements.
Key design decisions
Organized information progressively from business value to technical detail
Used anchor navigation so buyers could move directly to relevant content
Supported both quick orientation and deeper, self-directed evaluation
Organized use cases around buyer problems rather than internal product categories
Created reusable sections that could flex across different offer types
Connected each offer to clear next steps and supporting resources
Offer Page Framework
Overview
A clear definition of the offer, its intended audience, core benefits, and supporting proof points.
How it works
Architecture, integration, and operating-model information for technical evaluators.
Use cases
Real-world scenarios organized around buyer needs rather than internal product categories.
Next steps
Clear paths to trials, demonstrations, sales conversations, or related solutions.
Resources
Technical documentation, white papers, and deeper evaluation material.
Applying the framework
Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS)
The page demonstrated the complete framework, including anchor navigation, a clear product definition, business and technical detail, use cases, next steps, and supporting resources.
Managed Devices
The framework adapted to a different offer through an outcome-led introduction, business-value metrics, device options, customer evidence, and next steps for current and prospective customers.
Data Storage Services : The framework at scale
The structure scaled across a family of four related storage offers, allowing each service to remain distinct while maintaining a consistent evaluation experience.
Why this mattered?
Buyers could move between APEX offers without relearning how each page worked. Internal teams gained a reusable foundation that could support different products without creating a custom structure for every launch.
Final solution overview
The final experience connected the homepage, portfolio navigation, and offer pages into one end-to-end evaluation journey.
Buyers could move from understanding the APEX portfolio to exploring a category and evaluating an individual offer without losing context. The walkthrough below shows how those layers worked together.
Impact
During my tenure, subscriptions and annual recurring revenue across the broader APEX business grew 60%+. That result reflected initiatives across the organization rather than any single project.
My direct contribution was strengthening the digital experience supporting that period of growth:
Designed more than 10 product and offer experiences across the APEX portfolio
Established a shared page framework that continued supporting launches after I transitioned off the project
Reduced portfolio fragmentation by creating clearer relationships between categories and individual offers
Helped product teams better understand how enterprise buyers evaluated APEX
Created a scalable foundation that could accommodate new, renamed, and consolidated offers
Reflections & key learnings
This project reinforced that complex design problems are often alignment problems. Creating the framework required more than designing pages; it required building agreement across business units with different goals, roadmaps, and definitions of success.
It also changed how I thought about expert users. Enterprise IT buyers did not need to be guided through a marketing funnel. They needed clear, credible information organized around how they actually evaluated infrastructure.
Looking back, I would have pushed for portfolio consolidation earlier. That lesson now shapes how I approach growing products: establish the underlying structure before fragmentation becomes difficult to reverse.
