I don’t believe in Zoom fatigue

An Article by Matt Webb

It’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash.

It’s a hunch. I can’t prove this.

The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you.

Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be:

  • In a video call
  • In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others
  • In a doc together
  • On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around

And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them.