Vimeo • UX 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 maximizing user value.
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 understand our new shift in strategy, I began by understanding the context of the business through data, our new competitive positioning, and our three audience segments.
Analysing business performance through data
Partnering with data analytics, we identified key drop-off points, engagement gaps, and conversion bottlenecks.
Vimeo discovered 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.
This data validated our hypothesis for a more intuitive, high-converting onboarding experience to showcase Vimeo’s full potential.
Understanding our new audience
Vimeo’s diverse product offering from video creation to virtual event hosting and content monetisation—attracted three distinct user segments.
Partnering with UX Research, we explored key behaviour influencers:
What motivated each segment to explore Vimeo.
Their biggest challenges in adopting video solutions.
How Vimeo could immediately demonstrate value for their specific needs.
These insights became the foundation for redefining Vimeo’s onboarding experience, ensuring users were guided toward the features that mattered most to them—right from the start.
Identifying areas of friction in the current journey
In collaboration with data analytics and product marketing, we mapped out
Identifying friction in the user journey
Mapping the experience from first discovering Vimeo to signing up for a free trial and eventually upgrading, we identified potential barriers;
A paywall appeared too early, right after users completed the onboarding questionnaire. This aligned with a high drop-off rate at this stage, suggesting a mismatch between user expectations and the experience.
The challenge was clear: how do we balance business revenue drivers while creating a seamless, value-driven user experience?
Learning from high performing onboarding journeys
To define best practices, I analyzed how industry leaders designed their onboarding flows—focusing on progressive education, early value realization, and conversion triggers. This provided inspiration for refining Vimeo’s approach.
Ideation: defining a framework for success
Defining the “aha” moments
Designing a successful onboarding experience is challenging—95% of redesigns fail, and users form first impressions within seven seconds. To ensure success, I defined a framework capturing three key value moments:
Moment of value perception: Users first grasp of Vimeo can help solve their needs (video marketing, employee communication, and video monetisation).
Moment of value experience: Users perform their first action on Vimeo to complete their job successfully.
Moment of value adoption: Users invite their team members to collaborate through video.
Optimising ‘aha’ moments through user psychology
To accelerate these moments, I restructured Vimeo’s onboarding journey into a personalized, goal-oriented flow:
Segmenting users by role → Identifying their key problem immediately.
Contextualizing Vimeo’s value → Showcasing relevant features before asking users to take action.
Guiding users toward early wins → Ensuring their first interaction is impactful.
Conducting experiments to test optimisation
Creating solution approaches
With a clear understanding of our problem space, I crafted three approaches considering ease of completion, engagement, and personalisation.
Wireframe #1: One-page survey → Feature highlight → Guided tour
Wireframe #2: Direct entry → Survey → Feature highlight & tour
Wireframe #3: Multi-step, personalized feature showcase → CTA-driven engagement
Stakeholder feedback raised concerns about step complexity and completion rates. To led data our hypothesis, we ran a series of tests to validate our approach.
Hypothesis testing and key insights learned
I conducted an A/B/C test against our existing survey design. Our goal: Identify the most effective path to user activation.
What we learned:
Give before you ask – Users expected immediate value when providing input.
Personalization drives engagement – Users saw higher value when onboarding reflected their needs.
Perception shift was critical – Many still saw Vimeo as a “YouTube alternative” rather than a business tool.
Less is more – Users preferred an onboarding flow under three steps.
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
Dynamic messaging and visuals created excitement. A simple, two-step survey helped personalize the experience.
Old experience
The first ‘aha’ moment: Video solution capability education
Tailored onboarding per audience segment – Users immediately saw video tools relevant to their role, educating them on Vimeo’s expanded capabilities.
Old experience
The second ‘aha’ moment: A guided feature tour
Guided feature engagement to continue to engage and stay relevant. Clear headers drove users to key tools, ensuring they experienced product value early.
New experience
New 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 taking on solo leadership.
Balancing experimentation constraints with optimised user experience.
Advocating for a business case with stakeholders and C-suite.
Lessons learned
Experience matters - first time impression impacts long term success.
Rich cross-functional collaboration fuels stronger solutions.
Data is essential to make a compelling case for design advocacy.