Wistia - Webinar Setup Modal

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Replaced a cluttered single-page setup with a guided 4-step wizard. It launched to new Live accounts, then became the default for everyone who creates a webinar.

1 in 2 hosts who open the wizard finish all four steps · 1 in 4 webinars created go on to be hosted · 1,246 wizard relaunches · Rolled out to 100% of webinar creators

Logistics

  • Role: Lead Product Design (Growth-Onboarding)

  • Team: Onboarding PDE team, Live (Webinar) team

  • Timeline: Started researching November, 2025 – shipped Dec 9, 2025; rolled out to everyone February, 2026

  • My responsibilities: Competitive audit, problem framing, IA, interaction and UI design, cross-team alignment, QA

The problem - “I keep putting it off”

  • After clicking Create, hosts landed on one Overview page with about 10 interactive elements. The page saved changes without saying so. The audience features (chat, Q&A, polls) were hard to find. And the only way to finish was a small "Join event room" link in the header.

  • For Wistia, this was a business problem, not only a usability one: Live was part of the T2 growth goal of improving net dollar retention (NDR) through deeper product adoption.

"I'm overwhelmed by all the setup options and don't know which steps are essential versus optional, so I keep putting it off instead of actually going live."

And from my competitive Analysis, I identified 3 main solutions that others are doing:

  • Juxtaposition

  • Hyperlink

  • Adding bottom section.

What the audit told us

Because this was supposed to be a quick and small scope project, I decided to skip the wireframes phase and ideated in rather hi-fi mockups (thanks to the flexibility and efficiency of Figma.)


For the ideation phase, I went through 4 iteration rounds, with each round consisting of:

  • Check in daily with peer designers for early feedback.

  • Ad hoc touch base with engineers for any potential technical constraints.

  • Analyze the risk of cannibalism vs the discoverability of the new plan

Build a strong rapport with the engineers to easily organize ad hoc syncs. 
And for each iteration, I assessed the risk of cannibalism and the discoverability of the new additional plan. For example, the approach where the plan is added next to the other 3 has the greatest discoverability but requires huge effort in changing the page layout; it also increase the chance of cannibalism to the old plans.

Apply visual design system

Additionally, for these iterations, I adhered very closely to the existing assets in Animoto’s Figma library/design system to make sure the designs are in harmony with the rest of the page/website

Final result

A minor success

  • Soon after this shipped along with the accompanying features on the app, we saw a huge instant interest in this package.

  • Though the plan only survived a month because Animoto had shifted its business priorities.

© Jason Ma