Rosenverse
What co-speech gestures reveal about users’ thinking during interviews

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

What co-speech gestures reveal about users’ thinking during interviews

Friday, June 30, 2023 • Rosenfeld Community
Share the love for this talk
What co-speech gestures reveal about users’ thinking during interviews
Speakers: Dane DeSutter and Stephanie Scopelitis
Link:

Summary

Drs. DeSutter and Scopelitis discussed how User Experience (UX) researchers can triangulate and enrich information from one-on-one interviews by attending to users’ co-speech gestures—the spontaneous movements that humans make with their hands and body when communicating. Gestures are a “window to the mind” and can reveal unspoken information about users’ emotional states as well as the structure and composition of their mental models. They concluded with a practical guide for efficiently implementing gesture research.

Key Insights

  • Gestures provide a non-verbal window into users' mental models, often revealing thoughts not expressed in speech.

  • Representational gestures, especially those made in personal gesture space, indicate cognitive processes and implicit imagery.

  • Users commonly hold multiple, context-dependent mental models rather than a single static one.

  • In interviews, interviewer gestures increase participant gesturing and improve conversational rapport.

  • Video interviews pose challenges for capturing gestures fully; positioning and prompting can mitigate this.

  • Speech-gesture mismatches often signal ongoing mental model construction or word searching by users.

  • Gestures can reveal emotional attachment or disengagement with technology, influencing adoption and retention.

  • Mental models can be anchored by recent technology prototypes, such as chat GPT for AI understanding.

  • Structured interview protocols that elicit gesturing and separate talking from tool use optimize gesture data collection.

  • Open source motion tracking and gesture analysis tools can aid qualitative research by quantifying gesture patterns.

Notable Quotes

"Gestures are a window to the mind."

"Gesture and speech form an integrated system; they reinforce one another."

"We’re really leaving half of our data on the table by not attending to gesture when eliciting mental models."

"Gesture is not computer and smartphone gestures, but spontaneous movements people make with hands and arms."

"Four me gestures happen in that personal gesture space and serve as thinking tools for the speaker."

"When gestures and speech mismatch, it often means the speaker is still refining their mental model."

"Without looking at the gesture, we would have come to a less complete mental model."

"Users have more than one mental model; they can be constructed on the fly depending on context."

"The degree to which the user feels in control with an intelligent agent brings up conversational mental models."

"The more you gesture, the more your interviewee will gesture."

Ask the Rosenbot
Heidi Trost
To Protect People, You Have to Protect Information: A Human-Centered Design Approach to Cybersecurity
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Kevin Bethune
Gatekeepers and Servant Leadership
2020 • DesignOps Community
Jennifer Fraser
What would Emmy Noether Do? Math, Models and Mulling in UX Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Susan Simon-Daniels
War Stories LIVE! Susan Simon-Daniels
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Ned Dwyer
The Intersection of Design and ResearchOps
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Farid Sabitov
Automatization for Large Enterprise Teams
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Dave Malouf
Panel: Design Systems and Documentation
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Veevi Rosenstein
Building for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Joshua Graves
We Need To Talk: Navigating Conversations with Your Boss (Part 1 of 3)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Saara Kamppari-Miller
DesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility
2022 • DesignOps Community
Aditi Ruiz
Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Ron Bronson
Design, Consequences & Everyday Life
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Mila Kuznetsova
How Lessons Learned from Our Youngest Users Can Help Us Evolve our Practices
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Maria Giudice
Empowering change: Reigniting purpose, passion and impact in research
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold

More Videos

Kevin M. Hoffman

"Designers want more time to prototype and really ensure what ships is successful, but we just don’t have enough people or time."

Kevin M. Hoffman

Theme 2: Enterprise Team Journey

June 3, 2019

Sean McKay

"Reality space focuses on customers’ mental models, appetite for change, and the broader solution ecosystem."

Sean McKay

Whole Product Thinking: Expanding beyond problem and solution space thinking

March 14, 2024

Mark Interrante

"Many organizations silo data inputs and prioritize within categories before combining results."

Mark Interrante Harry Max

AI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)

July 11, 2024

George Hinchliffe

"We’re drinking our own champagne—using our products internally months before release to stress test and improve them."

George Hinchliffe Joy Liu

Delivering Amazing Experiences

June 10, 2021

Laura Weiss

"Taking a coaching approach supports the other person’s discovery and offers the greatest possibility for change."

Laura Weiss

There is No Playbook: Leader as Coach During Challenging Times

April 26, 2024

Cheryl Platz

"Improv has paid off greatly for us in our professional lives as well."

Cheryl Platz

Collaborative Creativity through Improv

November 7, 2018

Brian Moss

"Mental health first aiders take on responsibility beyond their role, so we must consider how this affects them."

Brian Moss

What Does it Mean to be a Resilient Research Team?

March 9, 2022

Mackenzie Guinon

"Not everyone can become a great UX researcher, but a great UX researcher can come from anywhere."

Mackenzie Guinon

M.C. Escher’s UX Research Career Ladder

March 9, 2022

Sheryl Cababa

"The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed."

Sheryl Cababa

Living in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset

June 6, 2023