As Loom has grown to an amazing 25+ million registered users in just a few years, it’s more critical than ever that we prioritize performance and reliability in everything we do. That’s why in 2023, we dedicated our largest team of engineers to improving performance and solving customer-facing issues.
It may be untraditional to call attention to product areas we’re still working to improve, but Loom has always followed a philosophy of building in the open. So while we still have more work to do—reliability is an always-on workstream for us—I wanted to share some of the great progress we’ve made so far.
Here are the highlights:
We now auto-recover (with no support ticket required) more than 80% of videos that experience initial processing errors.
Loom’s video player page loads 30% faster for all viewers.
Customer bug fix rate improved by more than 100% — with more bugs fixed than reported by customers in the last two months.
Keep reading to see how we did it ⤵️
Dependable video processing
Our top priority has been improving the success rate around video processing. We know it’s an acutely painful experience to spend time and effort recording, only for the video to get stuck uploading and ultimately not be shareable. In the last quarter, we made significant investments in building automatic upload recovery processes for both the Loom Chrome extension and desktop recorders.
The impact? We now successfully auto-recover more than 80% of videos that experience processing errors—compared with 0% automatically recovered just a few months ago. This improvement has resulted in a 60% decrease in support tickets regarding video uploading and downloading issues since August. We’ve got more work ahead to keep driving this number down, but I’m proud of the progress made so far to improve this particularly painful customer experience.
Faster video viewing
When you share a Loom, your viewers click open your video link and expect a smooth, fast page load. As of September, our video player page now loads 30% faster for all viewers! And we’re definitely not stopping there. This number has improved every month since we put our team on it, and will continue to improve.
We also made the viewing experience feel snappier and more compelling by replacing a clunky preview GIF of your videos with a higher quality, smoother preview image and MP4 thumbnail. This smoother and faster viewing page experience helps ensure your messages are seen.
Proactive error messages and core improvements
Improving the “helpfulness” of error messaging may not be the most technically complex area we’ve made progress, but it’s fundamental for a positive user experience. While we keep working towards eliminating errors and crashes while recording—over 99% of videos recorded with our Chrome extension and desktop recorders now start and complete successfully—we’re also focused on improving our user-facing messaging so you know why certain issues occur, and what you can do to prevent recording errors before they happen.
While the team added 20+ error messages to help you record more successfully, our primary focus was tackling the dreaded “silent Loom,” where there’s no audio in the final video. We’ve added clearer warnings when your mic input isn’t detected or when your recording set-up won’t correctly capture internal audio, so you can make adjustments before you invest time and energy into recording. And we greatly simplified the permissions flow when you download the Loom desktop app, so you’re set up for camera and audio success from the start.
All these improvements required a true cross-functional team effort. Our amazing support team helped identify patterns where errors were particularly confusing or frustrating; and our brand team helped create new principles to guide and scale error messages.
Think we’re not serious about celebrating core improvements? Our internal Loom (screenshot above) about error message changes got more emoji reactions than our holiday party announcement.
We’re also shipping fixes faster than ever. We completely overhauled our release process in Q3 to ship fixes more frequently, and our customer bug fix rate improved by more than 100% in the last quarter. Loom actually had more bugs resolved than opened by customers in the last two months.
Commitment to a best-in-class customer experience
One last stat I’m really proud of? Our customer support team has seen more than a 20% drop in tickets related to bugs or quality issues.
"@loom is on the up. They're getting on top of performance issues and the AI automated titles and summaries are a solid time saver. Credit where credit's due.”
— Justin Bohlmann Head of Growth
There’s so much more we can and will improve for our customers. We’ll launch brand new functionality, continue delivering a time-saving AI Suite, and maintain the integrity of our core product experience. I hope that by sharing our progress from 2023, we can continue to demonstrate how much we value your support. Thank you for putting your trust in Loom.
