Episode five of Roast My Product, and this time we did something different. Instead of jumping straight into a redesign like we usually do, Roya, George, and Colin decided to properly roast Loom first. Because honestly? We use it every day, we like it a lot, and it still drives us a bit crazy.

The workspace problem

Roya kicked things off with something that had been bugging her for a while. She created her own Loom account — totally separate signup — and immediately got dropped into Colin's, Katie's, and Lewis's workspaces. No choice, no opt-in. Just... there.

Which sounds like a minor thing until you think about it for five seconds. She's recording client videos, internal feedback, draft walkthroughs that aren't ready for anyone to see. And she has no idea which of those are actually private and which ones her colleagues can access. The workspace model in Loom is built around teams and shared spaces, but there's no clear "this is mine and only mine" zone.

Her workaround? Asking colleagues to share their access manually so she could figure out who sees what. That's not a solution. That's a symptom of a confusing permission model.

The cluttered viewing experience

George jumped in with a different frustration: the interface when you're watching shared videos. Too much going on. Sidebars, suggestions, workspace navigation — all competing for attention when you really just want to watch the thing someone sent you.

It's the kind of UI clutter that creeps in as features get added over time. Each element makes sense individually. Together, they create noise.

What we'd change

After the roast, we got into redesign territory. Three main things:

Give every user their own workspace. Not a space within someone else's workspace. An actual personal workspace where your videos live by default, private until you decide otherwise. This solves Roya's core frustration and it's honestly how most people expect it to work already.

Make privacy status obvious. When you're looking at a video or a folder, it should be immediately clear: is this shared or private? Who can see it? Right now you have to dig through settings to figure that out. A simple visual indicator — a badge, an icon, whatever — would go a long way.

Clean up the viewing experience. When someone clicks a shared video link, they're there to watch a video. Minimize everything else. The navigation, the workspace sidebar, the related content — tuck it away. Let the content breathe.

None of this is revolutionary. That's kind of the point. These are the small, obvious improvements that make daily use smoother — and they're the kind of thing that gets missed when a product team is focused on big new features.

Why this matters beyond Loom

We do these roast episodes because we think product critique is underrated. Every product has friction points. The teams building them are often too close to see it, or they've prioritized other things. Outside eyes catch what daily users have learned to tolerate.

If you're building a product yourself and want that kind of honest feedback on your UX, that's something we do. Take a look at what we offer: https://pyango.ch/pricing/

Roast my Product Episode 5: Loom video recording web application

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