Project “Invite to collaborate”: Brainstorm: Add your ideas ✍️🤔💭

Hey, my name's Sean. I'm a designer here at Loom, and on behalf of the growth team, Jess and Mamu, I wanted to share a, a brainstorm with you all that we're hoping you can participate in.

It'll only take a few minutes of your time in Fig Jam and see this context as something that'll help you generate ideas.

If you don't have time to watch the context, I'll also time timestamp where the instructions for the brainstorm are just so you can get right to it.

So with that, I'll just dive right into what, what this project called Invite to Collaborate is all about and what we're hoping to brainstorm on.

So in terms of the, the problem and the opportunity, the problem is this idea that the value of inviting as a creator and joining as a viewer is often unclear.

So what that means is First Loom is really not thought of as a collaborative surface. So many viewers ultimately opt not to join the product unless they start creating, and we don't believe that the problem here is related to like the invite model we have.

So for example, we have this Invite UI that lets anyone invite people they work with to join the product via email.

We don't think it's a usability issue. We think it's a problem related to incentives. So we don't think that there is clear incentive around like why I should join Loom as a collaborative surface if I'm already working with someone in Slack in Teams, for example.

So we really need to think about as part of this whole exercise, how we can clarify the why behind inviting and behind joining at these key moments.

So don't just think about like one moment to invite someone or one opportunity to like educate someone like why they should join.

Think about the entire journey and like what are those like special, like in context moments where we should really like clarify like Loom as a collaborative surface.

The other related business problem is this idea that Loom does not offer unique value to viewers. So like I mentioned, Slack and Teams are ultimately where people collaborate today.

They're the vital hubs of collaboration. If we want to attempt to challenge this, we have to offer unique value that these products do not.

So one example of that is like today you can comment contextually within someone's loom so you can comment on a particular timestamp.

I think that offers a creator unique value compared to Slack and Teams in that they get more context just by associating your comment with that timestamp.

What else can we do using Loom as this unique medium that Slack and teams can't do Related to collaboration? I have, I have some examples from, from other products sim in similar in in a similar space.

I would say I'll go through these really fast. So these are things that really drive collaboration and they make it clear that these products are beneficial to both the initial creator and to audience members or just people who are, are viewing content.

So for Figma, They have things like commenting, they have voting, they have stickers. If you're in the same Figma design file as someone else, you see real time activity.

You see what they're doing and that unlocks things like, oh, like since someone else is here, like, let's chat live about this in Figma.

So they, they've really come up with all these like unique ways to collaborate based on their product that really drive really drive inviting and joining because Figma is seen as a collaborative surface Zoom, Zoom has real time reactions.

They have polls, they have whiteboards, they have breakout rooms, which I think we're most familiar with. I think what Zoom has done with these features is they've really made it clear that audience members, much like an audience in front of a stage, have lots of ways to participate.

So even if you're not comfortable speaking up in front of a large group in Zoom, like you're probably a lot more comfortable in a breakout room or you're probably more comfortable like voting in a poll.

And then Instagram stories, they let people remix other people's photos, other people's videos. They also make it really easy if you like a video or photo from someone to direct message them and really have a deep conversation there.

So they have this deep connection between creators and viewers that they've established via private messaging, and then they have things like reactions, polls, and AMA is basically asking me anything.

So in an Instagram story, you can basically prompt your viewers to answer a specific question, which really drives participation. And then things like Docs, whether it's Google Docs or Notion have things like in Google Docs you can assign portions of a document to others.

So you can have somebody like maybe refine a paragraph for example. And just co-editing. Co-editing in general is a core part of of documents.

So we're thinking about like if any of this can be applied to Tulum. And another piece of inspiration that is really important to call out is the viewer X Team on Create is currently thinking about ways to drive collaboration and really establish Loom as this collaborative surface.

So this is Sean Goodwin's work and it's just showing similar to Figma, like you can comment on particular aspects of a loom.

So maybe this particular segment of this, this what do I call it? Like this, this thumbnail within the the screen share is, is something you can comment on.

He's also made it clear that conversation is a part of Loom by surfacing that more to the side and like further up on the, on the page.

And then he's also elevated reactions to make it clear that participation is a core part of the Loom experience. So these are just some ideas that hopefully help you come up with your own or maybe these ideas are something you wanna riff on to really help inform maybe next steps.

So with that, I'll just get right into the brainstorm. So we have two brainstorm prompts and We're gonna gonna answer these in Fig Jam with just using Post-It Super simple.

I'll show you how to do that the first time. Lightly statement is, how might we make existing incentives to invite and join feel more critical?

So consider all the, the various touchpoints that a creator and a viewer experiences, whether it's joining the product for the first time, whether it's receiving a loom in Slack for the first time or anything else.

Like how, how do these touchpoints give us a unique opportunity to frame why it's important to invite and why it's important to join to creators and viewers.

The second how might we statement is how might we incentivize creators and viewers in new ways? So think about incentives beyond storage incentives, and also think about new ways to collaborate.

So you saw what the viewer X team is working on. Are there ways to maybe contribute to that existing functionality that is going to be experimented with?

Or does that spawn new ideas for you? Like, do you, can you think of new ways to collaborate on Loom that would compel someone to invite or would compel someone to join?

So with that, I'll just hop into Fig Jam and show you how to how to generate ideas with us. So in the Fig Jam file for brainstorming, which I'll, I'll add the link to there at the top, there are these examples that I took from competing products that hopefully helps like, it, it just is hopefully more inspiration for you as you're thinking about ideas, but no pressure to check them out if you're curious about them.

I created a loom that walks through like what they are and like why they're relevant. And then the most important thing to look at is in Fig Jam, there's those two prompts that I just walked you through, and these are the areas to just generate your post-Its so prompt one and I have some ideas.

So one idea related to how might we make existing incentives to invite and join feel more critical. One idea I came up with is maybe no one viewed my loom after X days.

So I receive an email and a notification to invite others with one click as as one idea. And then for the second prompt, how might we incentivizing creators and viewers in new ways?

I think this one's really hard. One idea I had is maybe as a paying customer, I pay less or have access to special features if I help grow my workspace.

So would love any and all ideas generate as many post-its as you can think of. No idea is a bad idea.

Also screenshots are great. Like if you, if you see a product like I did that is relevant to this space, just take a screenshot, throw it in here.

You can also record looms if you want to explain your idea. So if you record a loom, all you have to do is actually paste that link and it'll automatically generate a, a little loom thumbnail for you and you can just throw that in here too, which is, is pretty cool.

So let me know if you have any questions and thanks for helping us out.