Danielle is a journalist turned content marketer who’s spent the greater part of her career building marketing and content strategies at early-stage B2B tech companies. Based in New Orleans, you can find her at a concert, Take Paws animal shelter, or eating her weight in crawfish!
ICYMI: Atlassian (behind productivity powerhouses Confluence and Jira) bought Loom for $1 billion in October 2023.
The acquisition was big news across the board, but it’s particularly huge for operations, enablement, and training teams.
How come?
1️⃣ Atlassian’s acquisition of Loom will lead to a lot more Looms in Confluence Knowledge Bases—and it won’t necessarily be a good thing for end users trying to learn new software.
It’s already hard for people to find what they need in your Knowledge Base. Flooding it with Looms (of constantly evolving processes) will quickly bury relevant content about your market, customer, company, product, or service. Aka the information you want people to use your Knowledge Base for.
2️⃣ The line between what should and shouldn’t be a video is going to get blurred—and the number of people using Loom for the wrong reasons is going to skyrocket.
We love Loom as much as anyone. It’s GREAT for communicating one-way updates and ideas, eliminating unnecessary meetings and emails, and powering async progress across time zones.
But Loom wasn’t designed to teach people how to use software. In fact—new research shows people don’t like watching long videos when they’re trying to follow a standard operating procedure.
Let’s be real. End users:
❌ Don’t want to watch a 10-minute video to do something that takes 30 seconds
✅ Do want to skip straight to the step where they’re getting stuck
❌ Don’t really care about your voiceover or tone
✅ Do want “just enough context” to get back to the task at hand
❌ Don’t want a monologue to go with their software training
✅ Do want a highly prescribed way to get stuff done with screenshots for each step
So why are there (already) so many software training videos floating around? For one: Because there’s a lack of education about tools purpose-built for software training.
With a Digital Adoption Platform, training managers can:
If none of those bullet points stick, that’s okay. As long as you remember that just because you can make a video, doesn’t always mean you should.
Dive into more about our Loom predictions and the state of change enablement on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
