As Loom's Mobile Product Designer, it's important for me to quickly review new work as it’s built by an engineer — both to ensure visual consistency with my designs and to check for any bugs, quirks, or errors. For example, sharing work and giving feedback asynchronously was crucial during Loom's rebrand, which helped us work cross-functionally on two complex projects simultaneously: making updates to the visual design and to the functionality of the Loom mobile app.
Our iOS app helps me get more out of Loom when I’m on the go: demoing an app, recording a quick video message, or catching up on a team update away from my desktop. The mobile app is also great for recording and sharing fast and detailed feedback on mobile products.
Screen recording with the Loom mobile app provides me with a testing tool to visually highlight areas of feedback, pinpoint exact issues and workflows which need attention, and — most importantly — provide a way to quickly share what I see with my teammates so we reach a solution together and in less time.
How do you incorporate video messaging into mobile QA protocols? Below are some ways I use Loom as a product designer; for mobile app testing to streamline the mobile feedback process and get the most out of mobile testing with Loom.
5 tips to use mobile screen recording for product design QA
1. Add screen recording to your control center. 🕹
Screen recordings can be initiated from within Loom or from your iPhone’s Control Center. Starting a recording from the Control Center allows you to create neater, more concise recordings with less context switching between apps.
To start, customize your Control Center to include the screen recording option — easy to do from your iPhone settings:
Once the screen recording icon is added to your Control Center, you can quickly start recording from wherever you find yourself on your phone. Press and hold the screen recording icon to open the menu to select the destination for your video, select Loom, and start your broadcast!
Related reading: How to Record Your Screen on iPhone — The Loom Blog
2. Title your mobile screen recordings as you go. ✅
It's easy to lose track of QA issues as they begin to stack up, but a small investment upfront can save a lot of time later on. Using Loom on mobile is an easy, agile way to catalog your recordings as you go, thanks to our post-recording screen. While your video quietly uploads in the background, enter a title to capture the issue. There's no harm in adding an emoji or two, either. 🥳
After recording my videos on mobile, I can easily access and refer to these recordings from my video library. Titled recordings make it faster to compile QA documentation and easier for other members of the Product Design and Development teams with less context to quickly understand the purpose of a recording when a loom is shared with them.
Remember to turn on push notifications in the Loom app before you start recording. After you stop a screen recording, one tap on the push notification opens the Loom app where you can immediately title and share your video.
3. Use shortcuts to copy and share Loom video links in one tap. 🔗
The post-recording screen includes a small but significant new feature: One tap copies the video link to your clipboard. You can still share by any number of other methods in Apple's share drawer, or share later from your desktop, but this shortcut comes in handy when work moves fast. You can jump into Slack, email, or wherever you need to get your feedback across, and paste your link. With Loom your videos are automatically saved and shareable the moment your recording ends.
4. Narrate if needed (and don’t forget to turn on the mic). 🎙
Depending on your feedback process and how Loom fits into your team's workflow, you can narrate the issues you are finding as you record them. Some issues are more self-explanatory, but adding verbal context can be especially useful when going over complex flows or unearthing hard-to-recreate bugs where added detail enhances clarity. Our process relied on additional documentation in Notion and Jira, but by providing more detail up front, the recording itself stands up as an artifact without the need for a lot of supporting text — which, after all, would take up to 3x longer to type. Check that your mic is on before you start recording.
5. Turn your camera on for a more personal message. 🤩
The Loom mobile app doesn’t allow you to record a camera bubble over the screen like on the Loom desktop app. However, Android users may be happy to hear camera bubble recordings are coming to their phones soon — sign up here for updates.
You can still combine your camera and screen into one seamless recording (note: This works best once you have screen recording set up in your Control Center — see tip #1!). To do so, initiate a screen recording and open your iPhone’s camera app. Switch to the front-facing camera or use the camera tab from within the Loom app, and you're good to go! Bookending your screen recordings with a camera-recorded intro or outro adds the nuances of nonverbal communication for a more personal way to frame your feedback.
Record and share video messages seamlessly between desktop and mobile 🖥 🔄📱
Since a Loom screen recording is immediately viewable in a web browser regardless of where it was created, the Loom mobile app works in tandem with the Loom desktop app. During our rebrand QA process, Loom allowed me to move quickly. I would drop videos directly into a Slack thread from my iPhone or assemble documentation in Notion on my desktop so Loom Engineering Manager Luis could digest and respond asynchronously in his work day. Loom removes the logistical headache of moving video messages between platforms and devices so you can focus on recording and sharing your message.
As we move further into 2021, you'll see new features which make the mobile app a more valuable companion to our desktop product, including improved video playback, more in-depth engagement insights, and timely notifications. More to come soon!
Interested in building great mobile screen recording experiences with Loom? We’re hiring.