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
Jeff Gothelf
The Intersection of Lean and Design
2019 • Enterprise Community
Llewyn Paine
Coexisting with AI: A practical guide for researchers to navigate tools, ethics, and integration
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Steve Portigal
Looking Back…to Look Ahead
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Angelos Arnis
Our Fragmented Identity
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Amy Evans
How to Create Change
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Robert Fabricant
Industry junctures: Paths forwards for UXR and the critical decisions that get us there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Iram Shah
Closing Keynote: The View from the Top
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Jeff Ephraim Bander
Eye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Sheri Byrne-Haber
Accessibility at Scale
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Prabhas Pokharel
Order and Chaos: New Ways of Collaborating on Synthesis and Storytelling
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Abbey Smalley
Scaling UX Past the Size of Your Team
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Liwei Dai
The Heart and Brain of the AI Research
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Matteo Gratton
Can Data and Ethics Live Together?
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Sheryl Cababa
Thinking in systems to address climate with Sheryl Cababa
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Alfred Kahn
A Seat at the Table: Making Your Team a Strategic Partner
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold

More Videos

John Taschek

"Success is about relationships: one person stopping you in the hallway to say hi is more valuable than many formal meetings."

John Taschek

Making People the X-Factor in the Enterprise

June 15, 2018

Kate Towsey

"Campfires are tribal, engaged knowledge spaces, libraries are corporate buildings, organized and curated."

Kate Towsey Jake Burghardt

ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt

October 16, 2025

Stefanie Owens

"Many federal benefit programs face challenges verifying income, causing stress and leaving billions in unclaimed benefits."

Stefanie Owens

Optimizing for Outcomes: Transformation Design in Systems at Scale

December 4, 2024

Rittika Basu

"Only 8% of older adults are using the internet in contrast to 48% of younger adults."

Rittika Basu

Age and Interfaces: Equipping Older Adults with Technological Tools

February 23, 2023

Liza Pemstein

"I had a hunger for process and efficiency once I built a feedback bot to share customer insights."

Liza Pemstein Jane Davis

Scaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever

March 27, 2023

Gabriela Barneva

"Testing accessibility at the design system level before design starts catches many issues early on."

Gabriela Barneva

Operationalizing Inclusive Design in Service Design

November 20, 2025

Bruce Gillespie

"Using the inverted pyramid doesn’t mean dumbing down your findings, it means explaining complex issues clearly."

Bruce Gillespie

Learning from journalism: Balancing impactful communication with compassionate storytelling

March 13, 2025

Christian Crumlish

"It’s a muscle to build: agreeing on goals, measuring, learning, and adjusting over time to avoid wasted effort."

Christian Crumlish Aditi Ruiz Johanna Kollmann Catt Small

Morning Insights Panel

December 6, 2022

Kate Towsey

"Synthetic users might be okay for finding average behaviors, but they won’t replace unique insights from real users."

Kate Towsey Basel Fakhoury Oren Friedman Graham Gardner

Participant Recruitment and Management Tools

March 12, 2026