Helping Animoto users with their content creation goals
As Product Designer on the growth team, we identified through data analysis that users consistently dropped off after creating their first video, leading to canceled subscriptions and increased churn. I led efforts to design a system that encouraged repeat creation and habit formation, improving long-term engagement and retention.
Company
Animoto
Video production software
My Role
Product Designer
Duration
8 Weeks
The Problem
Animoto’s user experience primarily supported short-term video creation, without clearly guiding users toward the ongoing, repeat content creation required for successful marketing—making it difficult for users to understand how to get long-term value from the product.
In other words, this meant users approached Animoto as a one-time project tool rather than a continuous content platform—leading to a sharp drop in engagement after the first month, low repeat usage, and missed opportunities for users to build effective video marketing habits or see meaningful results from their efforts.
How I Contributed
As Product Designer, I worked across the full product lifecycle to help drive engagement and repeat usage, partnering closely with cross-functional teams to shape both the strategy and execution of the solution.
- Led discovery and identified barriers to user adoption
- Synthesized research and data into opportunity areas
- Defined product strategy and core experience direction
- Designed user flows, interactions, and key journey moments
- Created wireframes and high-fidelity concepts and iterated with feedback
Who I worked With
Product
1 Product Manager
Software Development
3 Engineers
My Approach
Cross-Functional Discovery
Collaborated with Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Marketing to understand user behavior, business goals, and key challenges related to engagement and retention.
Opportunity Mapping
Facilitated the creation of an opportunity solution tree, synthesizing user needs and business goals into structured opportunity areas aligned to increasing repeat usage.
Quantitative Analysis
Analyzed behavioral data from highly engaged users to identify patterns in video creation, publishing frequency, and product usage over time.
User & Expert Interviews
Conducted interviews with internal marketing experts and highly engaged users to understand best practices for content creation, distribution, and measuring success.
Competitor & Pattern Analysis
Audited competitor products and adjacent platforms to understand how goal-setting, habit formation, and content planning are supported through established UX patterns.
This work established a clear understanding of how users approached video creation, where they struggled to see long-term value, and what behaviors defined successful, repeat usage. It also surfaced key gaps in how Animoto supported ongoing content creation, education, and goal-setting.
This foundation enabled us to move forward with a focused strategy centered on helping users build sustainable video marketing habits and increasing engagement beyond their initial project.
What we learned
As we moved through research and concept testing, a few clear patterns emerged. These insights directly informed the direction of the experience.
Users approached Animoto with short-term goals and lacked a path forward
Most users came to the platform to create a single video, with little awareness of the ongoing effort required for effective marketing or what to do next after completing their first project.
Repeat usage was driven by clear goals and structured guidance
Highly engaged users followed consistent patterns around what to create, how often to post, and how their content supported broader business objectives.
Education was as critical as creation tools
The core challenge wasn’t making videos—it was understanding what to make, when to make it, and why it mattered.
Motivation required visible progress and next steps
Users responded best to experiences that provided a sense of progression and clear, actionable guidance rather than open-ended workflows.
Turning Insights into Solutions
Each solution was designed to address key user needs and translate findings into more intentional product decisions.
Insights → Innovation
Users came to Animoto with short-term goals and often didn’t know what to do next
Designed a structured progression experience that guided users beyond their first video and made next steps clear and actionable
We introduced milestones and directional content that helped users understand what to create next, shifting the experience from one-off projects to ongoing video creation.
Insights → Innovation
Repeat usage depended on clarity, motivation, and seeing progress over time
Designed a milestone-based framework that reinforced progress and encouraged continued engagement
Instead of leaving users in an open-ended creation loop, we created visible progress markers that helped reinforce habit formation and repeat usage.
Insights → Innovation
Users lacked understanding of what to create and when to create it
Introduced guidance-driven surfaces that helped users decide what videos to make next based on context and marketing needs
We embedded lightweight direction into the experience to reduce uncertainty and support more confident, consistent creation behavior.
Insights → Innovation
Education was critical to helping users succeed long term
Integrated instructional and motivational content into the product experience to reinforce video marketing best practices
Rather than treating education as separate content, we brought it into the product experience to help users understand how to succeed over time.
The Impact
While this work was delivered within complex system constraints and cross-team dependencies, it helped establish a more unified and reliable claims adjustment experience that better supported accurate and efficient decision-making. It also created a shared foundation for how claims data could be structured and interpreted more consistently across teams.
Engagement & Retention
Increased the number of users creating videos in month 2+, showing early signs of improved repeat usage and post-onboarding engagement.
Habit Formation
Improved sustained video creation behavior over the first 4 months after signup, indicating stronger momentum beyond the initial project-based use case.
User Behavior Shift
Encouraged a transition from one-off video creation to more repeat, goal-oriented content production through milestone-driven guidance and structured progression.
Validation & Learnings
Early testing validated that milestone-based experiences resonated with users, particularly when combined with directional guidance on what to create next, informing future iterations of the concept.