Solving Zoom Fatigue

🤔 Understand

To better shape my understanding and empathise with others, the first step was to conduct some initial secondary research to guide exploration and design hypotheses. During my research, I studied interviews, articles, and journals to understand how environmental and technological factors have affected workplaces globally. What evolved from the initial research period, were the following key findings:

• Video calls require an additional level of focus to absorb information actively.
  Unconsciously, we typically rely upon help from non-verbal behaviours such as body language.
• Cognitive factors are also likely to contribute to fatigue.
  Increased distractions and multitasking threaten our attentional capacity.
• Conversing virtually provides a lack of perceived neurological reward.
  Face-to-face conversations set off our reward centres, better fighting off fatigue.
• The spotlight effect of video calling presents additional anxiety.
  Having the constant pressure of being on video places additional pressure to perform on participants.

🤝 Empathise

Having a better grasp of some key ideas and assumptions, I focused on the most important part of the design process - empathy. It's critically important we really understand the people and problem we're designing for and using any data we may discover along the way to challenge any underlying assumptions. To gather primary research, I began to design a survey and interview questions consisting of qualitative and quantitative questions to reach a comprehensive understanding.

Next, talking to Zoom users helped me better understand each of our unique situations faced while working from home. I gained valuable insights into difficulties and pain points associated with migrating to a digital meeting schedule. Some of the key findings from the interview were:

• Both participants mentioned agenda is a key measure of a successful meeting.
• Working from home has opened the door to time-spill, and meetings scheduled later.
• Typically, there is no agreed-upon break during a day, so meetings can often occur subsequently or often overlap.
• Zoom participants’ focus time tends to be 45 minutes or less.

🔍 Define

⚡️ People typically have 2-3 video meetings a day.

⚡️ The average meeting runs for 30 minutes.

⚡️ A participant’s emotional state right after can vary a lot depending on the meeting, but a good stretch is usually needed.

⚡️ Tech issues and lack of human emotion are the most disliked effect of video calling.

⚡️ The agenda of the meeting is only shared occasionally beforehand.

How might we hold more productive meetings so that less time is spent in video calls?

How might we eliminate distractions during meetings so that meetings are run more efficiently?

How might we make video meetings more comfortable so that people feel less drained?

How might we provide useful analytics so that users can make an informed choice about whether a meeting is required?

Next, I compiled these HMW's into an affinity diagram to further ideate each question, at different levels, forming a list of desirable features. I then used a Cost/Benefits Analysis to help guide myself to an MVP set of features to design within a week's timeframe.

Finally, with the idea's workshopped, I formed a feature set flow to demonstrate the user's journey navigating through the video calling experience. Some of the features I selected to prototype were:

Daily Screen Time summary.

The ability to add Agendas and a set timer to meetings.

Break scheduling.

Encouraging messages and helpful tips

I came to the conclusion of selecting these features because they felt most at home within Zoom. It's important to make new features feel natural and non-disruptive to the user.

✏️ Design

Entering into the design phase, I chose to focus on rapid-prototyping a revamped scheduling flow. Beginning with low-fidelity sketching is a great way to ideate quickly and focus on the bigger picture. Below, you can see some examples of how I progressed the scheduling tool's layout.

Next, the process of digitising the designs helps provide context to the usability of any ideation so far. At this stage, it still helps to keep details at a minimum to paint broader strokes.

⚡ Final Designs

Moving into high-fidelity designs, I decided to stay as true as possible to Zoom's guidelines while still enabling myself enough room to have fun! It's important to me that the design aesthetic felt authentic and beautiful.

Essential to what I view the Zoom experience to be, is how simple and easy it is to jump right into the calling functionality. This design is intended to feel unobtrusive as possible to that flow, while introducing detailed information, such as screen time summary and the user's schedule. Here the user can view at a glance how much time they've spent within meetings and measure their time. In the case below, we can see Zoom feeding an encouraging message.

Previously the scheduling tool window was a mess. It was optimised for speed but included too much technical detail. I have designed a new flow that highlights each phase of the process, trading off the single window's benefit but introducing an easier to follow the flow. In this window, we are presented with a singular goal, with highlighted text and clearer, more accessible buttons.

We can now invite participants before the call. To add a participant, simply type in the email address or select one from the list of ‘Recent’ names. You'll also notice as we progress, the breadcrumbs will form data from each step, allowing the user to edit and navigate through the pages easily.

Scheduling a meeting is improved visually and made easier with an interactive calendar view the user can drag out whenever it suits. Below you can see the available and busy times of participants and the function to change months and weeks.

Agenda items can be added to calls and meetings, with the ability to set a duration. Joining users can also add and change items if permitted.

Before confirmation, the final screen is a review of information determined so far. In this case, Zoom will prompt if a break could be implemented or the meeting conflicts with other users’ break time.

While in a call, the agenda and timer now appear within a tab on the right-hand side. This intuitively allows users to add or skip past agenda items and take a break when needed. During a set break, a series of scrollable messages of encouragement and helpful tips appear on the screen. Located down the bottom of the screen is an indication of time remaining, however, users can decide to signal they’re ready to resume the call with the ‘Ready’ button.

During a set break, a series of scrollable messages of encouragement and helpful tips appear on the screen. Located down the bottom of the screen is an indication of time remaining. However, users can decide to signal they’re ready to resume the call with the ‘Ready’ button.