Reimagining the Vimeo Viewer Experience
Summary
As Principal Product Designer, I led the fundamental unification of Vimeo's fragmented web viewing experiences. The core goal was to eliminate technical debt and design inconsistencies to create a singular, scalable platform that delivered a more consistent and predictable experience for viewers.
Role
Principal Product Designer
Date
2023-2025
Team
2 PMs, 1 Designer, 2 UX Researchers, 8 Engineers
Outcomes
A Unified Platform: Successfully merged three distinct surfaces into one cohesive system.
Reduced Overhead: This unified approach drastically sped up the design and development process for all viewer-facing features.
Scalable Foundation: Created a flexible, component-based framework that supports continuous feature development and innovation.
Problem
Fragmented & Inconsistent
Vimeo’s viewing surfaces had grown organically, with each looking and behaving differently. This created a jarring and confusing experience for viewers and led to massive inefficiencies for our design and engineering teams, who wasted resources maintaining multiple disconnected systems.
Before: An inconsistent ecosystem
Solution
A Unified, Modern Ecosystem
The solution was a single, unified platform that applied a consistent design and behavior across all of Vimeo’s core viewing surfaces.
The new modular components applied a singular design system, enabling us to support all viewing surfaces from one codebase.
Approach
Solving Inconsistency with Modularity
I owned the end-to-end design vision and strategy for this massive overhaul, driving the project from concept and comprehensive audit through final implementation. I was responsible for ensuring the solution was both user-friendly and scalable across the entire viewing ecosystem.
Scope & Ownership: Defined the vision and led the design effort to consolidate three fragmented web viewing surfaces into a singular platform foundation.
Collaboration: Partnered with a global team of product managers, researchers, and engineers to define, validate, and build the final solution.
Design Leadership: Guided the team on modular design principles, ensured consistency with Vimeo’s design system, and presented the strategy to executive stakeholders.
Foundational Mapping & Component Audit
I focused on solving the problem at its root by creating a scalable design framework. I began with a comprehensive audit of all existing experiences to identify overlaps and pain points.
Before: A foundational audit to map components by purpose.
Modular Framework
From there, I designed a modular framework that could unify the entire ecosystem. Built on a set of standardized components and rules, this framework allowed us to rebuild all viewing surfaces from a single foundation.
The foundation: Building blocks for phase 1
Co-Creating with Engineers & Users
I created both high- and low-fidelity prototypes to test usability with Vimeo users and guide the engineering team on layout and user experience behavior. I held regular working sessions with engineers to ensure we were aligned and building something scalable and shareable across the organization.
For engineers: Simplified prototypes focused on actions such as the behavior of comments on mobile versus desktop.
For users: Testing high-fidelity prototypes with users helped us make design decisions such as the placement of video engagement actions.
Final Design
Single Video Pages
We started by transforming private video pages, giving their layouts a modern, mobile-first look. We then applied the same approach to the most high-trafficked public video pages, ensuring a cohesive experience for all users.
Before and after: Private video pages
Before and after: Public video pages
Final Design
Showcases
We rebuilt showcases to be easier to customize and maintain by aligning them with our new design system. The three layout options were consolidated into a single, customizable collection of videos.
Showcases were unified into a single, adaptable layout, proving the framework’s flexibility to support complex edge cases like live events and search.
Outcomes
Faster & Efficient
By implementing this framework, we transformed the viewing experience while simultaneously driving business efficiency. The new platform enabled our teams to work faster and more efficiently, creating a scalable foundation that will support new features and innovation for years to come.
✔️
A Unified Platform
Successfully merged three distinct surfaces into one cohesive system.
✔️
Reduced Overheard
This unified approach sped up the design and development process.
✔️
Scalable Foundation
Created a flexible framework that supports future feature development.
Next Steps
Modernizing the Vimeo Community
The core building blocks are in place to rebuild the rest of the viewing ecosystem. For this next phase, the focus is on the Community. By designing an building an updated carousel and text components, we can successfully build Vimeo-owned channels, public channels, and profiles.
