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Loom makes it very easy to voice over and annotate a recording, with both individually editable in a way raw screen recordings don't support, and to share the r
by throwanem 3y ago
Loom makes it very easy to voice over and annotate a recording, with both individually editable in a way raw screen recordings don't support, and to share the result via a link.
It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive the kind of nuanced feedback that'd usually need to start off with a (necessarily synchronous) huddle.
- eptcyka 3y agoCool, this is the answer I was looking for. Thank you so much!
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoTheir video summarization and speed-ups are killer features.
- jzelinskie 3y agoI think lots of people haven't realized that video clips like Loom are actually built into Slack. The button that looks like a video camera below the input text box does it. It's not a full replacement, but it's the one you already have.
- gumby 3y agoI had never even noticed that button before. thanks.
- BossingAround 3y agoSlack's huddle feature is actually so nice. We use it more often than the dedicated MS Teams our org pays for (sadly).
- killingtime74 3y agoWe used it for a bit then stopped after discovering the screen share resolution is super low
- switch007 3y agoAnecdote: It's so well hidden or underpromoted that exactly 1 colleague has sent me a video recorded via Slack in its feature's existence. (employee count: mid 000's)
- tqi 3y agoPersonally, I'm not 100% sure those videos are a net benefit for teams. It definitely reduces the effort required by the person creating the video, but comes at the expense of requiring more effort from the people consuming the content. While there are certainly cases where showing is easier than telling, more often I find the quick videos are more verbose and less well organized than a doc or a message. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I [recorded a video] instead." Who knows, maybe the counterfactual isn't "wrote a concise doc," but rather "didn't share the information at all," in which case I suppose Loom et al is a positive.
- simlevesque 3y ago> but comes at the expense of requiring more effort from the people consuming the content. Before that you got an issue saying "There's a bug on the notification list" and you needed to figure out how to reproduce it. Now you get a video showing exactly how to reproduce it. It's a life changer and the opposite of what you describe.
- tqi 3y agoLike I said, there are definitely cases where showing is easier than telling, and bug reports often fall into that category. But as an alternative to more durable documents (design explorations, PRDs, etc), I often find that docs are more thoughtfully organized.
- throwanem 3y agoI would be very surprised to see anyone try to put a Loom in place of a PRD or RFC!
- tqi 3y agoOh sorry, I don't mean replacing the documents entirely. what I've seen is loom videos replacing sections of those documents (where in the past you would have expected screenshots + text to explain decisions or a design). To me, there may/may not be more total information, but the information density is much lower. I think my hierarchy as a reader is: document with good screenshots and text > doc with good loom video > doc with bad loom video > doc with no screenshots / bad text.