Designing Against Zoom Fatigue
In the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, people worldwide needed to switch from face-to-face meetings or lectures to video conferencing. As a consequence, the term ‘zoom fatigue’ was coined.
✎ By Demet Soyyilmaz, August 2022
Zoom fatigue is described as feelings of tiredness, anxiety, and irritability after using virtual video conferencing platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.
In this article we outline the underlying psychological human factors mechanisms of these fatigue qualities.
Understanding online meeting fatigue still holds to be very important. A lot of people all continue to attend multiple online meetings on a work day, with fully remote and hybrid work setups becoming standard for many companies. Therefore, designers of meeting hardware and software systems should consider psychological factors and mechanisms of online meeting fatigue in the development of the innovative, user-centric design of new generation systems.
People typically link Zoom fatigue to general variables such as having to sit for long hours and having to look at a screen for a prolonged period of time. While these are definitely true and important, there is a deeper set of root causes for Zoom fatigue from a human-computer interaction perspective.
At Design Psychology we recently conducted a user test on Zoom fatigue. Prior to the user testing, we conducted a human factor analysis and review of technical and psychological factors related to Zoom fatigue and their interplay. This analysis helped us design a well-informed and robust research study setup to measure the effects of improved technical qualities and user features.
In this article we share an overview of the psychological drivers of meeting fatigue that we sampled from the research literature. Although meetings, in general, can cause fatigue, extra fatigue is added when we sit in digitally augmented Zoom-style meetings. The shared root-cause of most fatigue drivers are linked to an additional cognitive (intellectual) burden that digital meetings introduce. We simply have to think harder in digital meetings. These added thinking “tasks” tells us a lot about how humans basically function - and what happens when digital tools do not support us.
Audio & Video Quality
From a human-computer interaction perspective, problems with audio and video quality are the primary factors that lead to meeting fatigue. Low, quality, increased noise, and delays are among the problems experienced in daily meetings that contribute to a fatiguing experience.
Specifically, issues with sound and video synchrony lead to increased cognitive processing on the listener’s side. The listener needs to compensate for mismatches in the auditory and the visual cues that come from a speaker in the meeting. In natural face-to-face communication we are very dependent on the synchrony of facial expressions, bodily gestures and the sound we hear.
Temporal Synchrony:
Human cognition is evolved to perceive sounds and images appearing at the same time as belonging to one source. This process operates “bottom-up”, meaning that it does not require effortful cognitive processing but rather happens naturally with sense organs’ automatic processing. When there are delays or lags in video or sound of a person speaking, for instance due to poor quality hardware, listeners need to activate extra cognitive resources, which results in mental fatigue. This effect is magnified when video and audio of multiple speakers’ in a meeting are asynchronous.
Spatial Synchrony:
Sound perception is closely linked to speakers’ and listeners’ very basic orientation in space. The default in online meetings is that everyone’s audio comes from one source in a specific location. So, although participants seem located at different places on the screen, the spatial sound does not often match that. Especially when someone has their camera turned off, it can be difficult to perceive rapidly who is talking, and we need to scan the participants list to see who is talking. Some systems have built a feature to tackle exactly spatial synchrony of sound and video. This feature ensures that if the person talking is on the upper right side, the sound comes from the right side of a speaker. That way, very basic perceptual knowledge is accounted for in a product design, leading to an improved user experience and reduced meeting fatigue.
Spatial Consistency:
Faces of participants typically appear in a “grid” in an online meeting user interface. In many systems, the faces jump around and change places. This is usually affected by screen sharing, someone else joining the meeting or someone leaving. This adds an intellectual burden for us to constantly update where someone is in space. Imagine talking to a room full of people, and they keep changing their seats… Ideally, places of participants should be constant, even if other people leave or join a session. Such a simple feature would reduce cognitive resources needed to monitor and update the location of participants. This is especially important if one has a moderator role in a meeting, needs to keep track of whose turn it is to speak next, for instance.
Psychosocial Factors
There are also psychosocial factors related to experiencing fatigue in online meetings. These factors are largely independent from technical qualities of the hardware or software system involved in a meeting, but they still interact with technical qualities of systems.
Turn-taking
In natural human conversation, people tend to speak over each other spontaneously whereas in online meetings people are expected to take turns, since one person’s audio gets cut out when another speaks spontaneously. Arguably, attendees in online meetings often need to pause their authentic voice and spontaneous ideas not to disturb the turn-taking and not to lead to audio cut outs. This can spillover to social rigidity and a reduction in creative idea generation as well.
Non-verbal Cues
Another psychosocial factor is regarding the limitations around non-verbal cues in online meetings. In face-to-face interactions, non-verbal cues are used to understand the message of the communicator. A lot of these are absent in video meetings, such as gestures and posture. This requires compensating by additional cognitive resources to communicate only by relying on language. In addition, people report a feeling of “being trapped” due to restricted range of motion allowed by standard webcams.
Self-presentation
Besides issues with limited camera range of motion, the camera itself is another aspect of online meeting fatigue. Although having camera on facilitates discussions and increases immersion in a social setting, it can also increase fatigue due to increased self-presentation and prolonged eye contact.
Having to present oneself constantly is related to self-referential thinking and feelings of self-consciousness, both related to anxiety and stress. Prolonged eye contact is in the nature of an online meeting when everyone has their cameras on. Although we consciously know people are not looking directly at us, multiple pairs of eyes directed to ourselves is a very basic threat at an implicit level. Due to these psychosocial factors, features such as hiding self-view and automatically showing only the faces of the person talking are important design inputs from a human-centric point of view.
This psychological perspective and feature analysis of online meeting systems was very useful in building a comprehensive user test. This approach can also help solidify and argue for inclusion or exclusion of new features and usability components to a system.
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References and Further Reading
Bailenson, J. N. (2021). Nonverbal overload: A theoretical argument for the causes of Zoom fatigue.
Karl, K. A., Peluchette, J. V., & Aghakhani, N. (2021). Virtual work meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic: the good, bad, and ugly. Small Group Research, 10464964211015286.
Nesher Shoshan, H., & Wehrt, W. (2021). Understanding “Zoom fatigue”: A mixed‐method approach. Applied Psychology.
Shockley, K. M., Gabriel, A. S., Robertson, D., Rosen, C. C., Chawla, N., Ganster, M. L., & Ezerins, M. E. (2021). The fatiguing effects of camera use in virtual meetings: A within-person field experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 106(8), 1137
Wiederhold, B. K. (2020). Connecting through technology during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic: Avoiding “Zoom Fatigue”. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 23(7), 437-438.