Product teardown — Loom
Transforming ideas into visual conversation and engagement with others
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1. What is Loom?
Loom is a cloud-based video messaging application that lets users create, capture, and share video content with each other. Loom is used for remote collaboration to convey information in a more personalized and dynamic way than traditional text-based communication.
Mission: To bring video messaging to the world
Founded in: 2015; acquired by Atlassian in October, 2023
Current # of users: 21M
2. What is Loom’s goal?
Loom’s main goal is to help people collaborate and engage with each other through the creation and sharing of visual video content.
3. Competitors
Loom primarily competes competes in the video creation and collaboration space with Veed, Vimeo, and Vidizmo. The aim is primarily on collaboration, getting feedback to the user on the content and creating conversation. A user on Loom will be excited to get notified that others are watching or interacting with their video; getting comments and reactions to their content from colleagues, school team mates, customers, etc. Secondary competitors for Loom, in the video creation and editing space would be Camtasia, Snagit, and ScreenFlow.
4. User Segments & Personas
Loom is used at its best when there is a need to exchange and collaborate on visual content with others creating conversation and engagement between parties.
5. User Experience
Onboarding:
What works here:
There are only four steps in the onboarding process that help me get quickly to the main page. At no point, I am asked to pay for the app. In fact, I do not see an upgrade button until I am on the main page after the onboarding. Loom caps the free usage to 5 minute video length and 25 video limit storage. It banks in the fact that the core user of this app will require more than that for what they need to do. Hence, no need to warn the user of this cap ahead of time before trying and no need to ask them to select a tier option for access. The freemium approach hooks the user to proceed to video creation making the need for longer video seamless as a natural progression of usage.
What did not work so well here:
Loom gets right to business by asking a question to the user on the type of work the user plans to do with Loom. However, it does not tell them what this information is used for. It only says “Product teams use Loom to provide context” if I select the Product role which is not descriptive enough and does not elicit excitement and curiosity on the user to see what else I can do with this app for my function.
Video Creation, Editing, and Sharing:
What works here:
Easy to get started creating videos. Editing is also not complex with only a couple of options: video trimming and stitching which is just the basic a user needs to get going.
Loom AI provides a summary and an editable list of chapters that help viewers get an idea of what the video is about ahead of listening. It also can help remove filler words and silences from the video. However, these are available on a trial basis as additional payment is needed.
Loom makes it easy to share a link to the recording with others directly into social media apps instead of having to download the file to upload on LinkedIn, for example. Users are re-engaged through in-app notifications when another user has engaged with the content
What did not work so well here:
There is only basic video editing such as video trimming and stitching. Other editing features that listed personas above may also want could include drawing, adding background music, and mouse click effects during screen sharing. Speakers also cannot pause the video temporarily while recording. Any issues while recording will need to be redone or edited after completing the recording. This puts undue pressure on a process that is already pretty stressful.
Presenters often will carry notecards or add comments in their Power Points to aid through their talk. Loom could add presenter-only views while recording where the presenter can add their notes. A sort of teleprompter to aid the presenter during the speech. This also eases the speaker mindset helping reduce friction for the user to get a video recorded.
The Loom dashboard has a white theme and there is no option to enable dark themes on the site. Presenters often spend long periods of time in front of the computer trying to get the recording right and editing. Enabling dark theme would make it more comfortable on the eyes through editing and recording.
Loom could go one step further and use the transcripts to help the speaker improve overtime by offering stats on speaker performance and suggestions for improvement. Loom AI does include removing filler words and silences from the video automatically but frequent speakers on the platform would find useful deeper speaker performance insights to improve overtime. If they get better at presenting in their videos and feel more comfortable as they feel a sense of growth, they will be more prone to make videos to share with others.
Thanks for reading!
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