Day 221: The Comparison Fallacy

I worked on account creation and logging in today — the boring bits of building a product that I’ve been avoiding for too long.

I often look to other products for inspiration, and one of my favorite products to study lately has been Loom, an app that makes it dead easy to record videos. It’s delightful to use because of its simplicity and reliability — two qualities that I try to endow in my own products.

Although they have native apps now, Loom started off as a Chrome extension, which many people still use. Since I’m building a website as a companion to Browserflow, I wanted to see how Loom handled their login flow given they have both a website and the extension.

The easiest implementation is to keep logging in on the extension and the website separate. It’s a bit extra work for the user to log into both properties, but you don’t need to worry about synchronizing the two.

But of course, Loom doesn’t settle for that. No matter what I tried, it Just Worked:

• If you log into the extension, you’re automatically logged into the website
• If you log into the website, you’re automatically logged into the extension
• If you disable the extension, log into the website, and then re-enable the extension, the extension still gets automatically logged in

I love playing around with products where the makers clearly paid a ton of attention to the details and getting everything to Just Work.

When I see products like that, I feel the urge to get my products to the same level of polish and sophistication, and then I remind myself that it’s silly to expect a single person building for a few months to match the efforts of a team with years of iteration. Inspiration is great; comparison is misguided.