Vimeo • Product Design Lead • 2022
Powering product-led growth for Vimeo Enterprise
UX / UI • Growth Design
A data-driven growth experiment and business case designed to enhance net revenue retention by optimising Vimeo’s first impression.
Overview
Vimeo, long recognized as an “indie video hosting platform”, faced a rapidly evolving landscape as video communication became essential in the post-pandemic world. With enterprises increasingly relying on video for collaboration, Vimeo pivoted into an all-in-one video solution for businesses. This shift introduced three new audience segments, bringing a key challenge: how to effectively showcase Vimeo’s video solutions in solving their Jobs to Be Done (JTBD).
As part of Vimeo’s Growth team, our mission was to reframe Vimeo’s value for both new and existing users, optimising journeys to drive product-led growth and long-term retention.
The approach:
To strengthen the top-of-funnel experience, I led an initiative to redesign Vimeo’s user onboarding, ensuring that every new user immediately recognized the platform’s value through a personalised experience. From identifying friction points to crafting a seamless onboarding journey, this case study explores the design challenge, my strategic approach, and how I secured stakeholder buy-in.
My role
Sole contributor leading end-to-end product design.
Results & impact
100%
In Net Revenue Retention
+3
C-suite stakeholders on board to implement user onboarding in product roadmap.
Discovery: uncovering the business opportunity
To align with Vimeo's new strategic direction, I began by analysing the business landscape through data insights, competitive positioning, and audience segmentation.
Analysing business performance
Collaborating with data analytics, we uncovered critical retention challenges:
66% of free trial users never upgraded to a paid plan.
72% of users skipped the onboarding survey.
Only 5% of returning users fully understood how Vimeo could meet their specific needs.
Data validated our hypothesis: a more intuitive, high-converting onboarding experience was essential to demonstrating Vimeo’s full potential.
Identifying friction in the current journey
Mapping the experience from discovery to conversion, we identified major drop-off points:
A premature paywall appeared immediately after users completed the onboarding survey, leading to high abandonment rates.
Users lacked a clear understanding of how Vimeo fit their needs, causing disengagement.
The onboarding experience failed to personalise recommendations, leaving users unsure of their next steps.
The challenge was clear: How could we balance strategically placing revenue drivers while optimising immediate value for first-time users?
Understanding the new audience
Vimeo’s expanded product offerings—from video creation to virtual events and content monetisation—attracted three distinct user segments.
Partnering with UX Research, we explored key behavioral influences:
What motivated each segment to explore Vimeo?
What were their biggest challenges in adopting video solutions?
How could Vimeo immediately demonstrate its value for their specific needs?
These insights formed the foundation for a redefined onboarding experience that guided users toward the most relevant features from the start.
Ideation: defining a framework for success
Pinpointing “aha” moments
The challenge with designing a successful onboarding experience is that 95% of redesigns fail, and users form first impressions within seven seconds.
To ensure success, I defined a framework capturing three key value moments:
Value perception: Users recognise how Vimeo solves their needs (e.g., marketing, internal communication, monetization).
Value experience: Users perform their first successful action on Vimeo.
Value adoption: Users invite teammates to collaborate through video.
Optimising ‘aha’ moments using user psychology
To accelerate these moments, I restructured Vimeo’s onboarding journey into a personalized, goal-oriented flow:
Segmenting users by role to immediately identify their key problem.
Contextualising Vimeo’s value by showcasing relevant features before asking users to take action.
Guiding users toward early wins to ensure their first interactions were impactful.
Experimentation: testing optimisation strategies
Creating solution user flows
With a clear understanding of our problem space, I crafted three approaches considering ease of completion, engagement, and personalisation.
One-page survey → Feature highlight → Guided tour
Direct entry → Survey → Feature highlight & tour
Multi-step, personalised feature showcase → CTA-driven engagement
Stakeholders were concerned on the complexity and completion rates, so we let data guide our validation by running a series of tests.
Hypothesis testing and insights:
I conducted an A/B/C test against our existing survey design to identify the most effective path to user activation.
What we learned:
Give before you ask: users expected immediate value in exchange.
Personalisation drives engagement: onboarding experiences tailored to segmentation led to higher completion rates.
Perception shift was crucial: many users still viewed Vimeo as a YouTube alternative rather than a business communication tool.
Less is more: flows with three steps or fewer performed best.
Delivering an optimised solution
Turning our testing insights into action, I designed an optimised experience that balanced the needs of our business whilst enhancing the experience for users.
We structured onboarding around action → aha moment → reward.
The first impression: a welcoming entry-point
To incrementally implement optimisations, we included dynamic messaging and visuals to create excitement. Streamlining the survey with two steps helped to personalise product recommendations.
Old experience
The first “aha” moment: education on Vimeo’s video capabilities
As a user lands into Vimeo’s homepage, they immediately saw tailored feature recommendations based on their segment. The experience repositioned Vimeo as a business tool, not just a hosting platform
Old experience
The second ‘aha’ moment: a guided feature tour
Once a user is aware of the applicable tools, they are guided to take their first action through an interactive walkthrough, encouraging further engagement within the onboarding journey. This reduces the learning curve with new tools, improving early feature adoption.
Optimised experience
Optimised experience
Building a business case for stakeholder buy-in
To strengthen Vimeo’s top-of-funnel experience, in partnership with product management we built a compelling business case for optimising user onboarding. We outlined the ROI and impact on Net Revenue Retention (NRR) beyond 100%.
As part of our growth experiments, this initiative successfully:
Positioned onboarding as a key growth driver within the organization.
Secured executive buy-in for future resource allocation.
Laid the foundation for long-term user retention strategies.
Even without a full rollout, this project reshaped how Vimeo viewed onboarding—not just as an entry point, but as a strategic lever for sustained growth.
Reflections
Challenges
Self-taught product-led onboarding and leading the initiative solo.
Balancing experimentation constraints with an optimal user experience.
Advocating for stakeholder buy-in across multiple teams and C-suite
Lessons learned
First impressions matter in directly influencing long-term user retention.
Balancing small incremental changes with larger design overhauls.
Data drives design advocacy: leveraging metrics helped make a compelling case for change.