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The psychological impact of video calls
What Zoom is doing to people, meetings and research.
Whether it’s Zoom, Teams, Slack, or any other platform, many of us are now working 100% via video calls for everything from stand ups (now sit downs), team meetings, briefings, presentations, workshops and of course.. user and stakeholder research.
It’s completely different
It’s not simply a case of having the same meetings as before Covid, but now online — it’s an entirely different psychological experience, and I’d suggest we’re going to start to see some kind of emotional and behavioural impact of this.
It could be an emotional impact on employee mental health, or a wider behavioural change — in the way we as team members handle the increase in video calls, or in the way employers will need to create processes for video meeting management. Most likely a combination of all of the above.
And it’s going to impact how we do UX research
There has always been remote research, but what are the implications of this 100% world, and what is it going to be like for participants and researchers who previously carried out the majority of their work in person?
Why Zoom calls feel weird or overwhelming
No doubt out of this time will come absolutely reams of academic research on what this is doing to our brains, but in the meantime, here are a few thoughts based on a combination of previous academic literature, and some new hypotheses from recent observation.
1. Video calls limit our social interaction
As much as video call tools such as Zoom have made working remotely possible for millions and as much as these tools help us stay connected to friends and family, they are, often without us really realising it, limiting the quality of our social interactions.
We cannot bump into someone in the street. We can’t hang out at someone’s house or a coffee shop and meet…
