Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"With our new operating model, partners are more confident funding UX ops because of increased clarity and focus."
John Calhoun Rachel PosmanTwo Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops
January 8, 2024
"Students cannot be taught what they need to know; they can only be coached to absorb it through demonstration."
Yoel SumitroActions and Reflections: Bridging the Skills Gap among Researchers
March 9, 2022
"Try to walk away from this conference with at least one new design ops buddy."
Louis Rosenfeld Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
October 2, 2023
"We have to go slow to go fast."
Daniel OrbachZero to One: Co-Creating Operating Models with your Team
September 23, 2024
"Being a manager is really hard, and just because you’re a great individual contributor doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it."
Kayla Farrell Chelsey Glasson Sean Fitzell Jared LeClercWhat It's Like To Be a User Researcher at Compass
March 12, 2021
"Ambiguity is totally normalized here and there’s a baseline acceptance that the business is kind of unknowable."
Rebecca GimenezWork in Progress: Service Design at Airbnb
December 3, 2024
"Customer value outcomes should drive empowered product teams rather than technical outputs or budgets."
Sabrina Mach Nina WainwrightHow to Design Your Design Operating Model
September 29, 2021
"Without these rules and conventions, we wouldn’t be able to improvise."
Jim KalbachJazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
November 6, 2017
"If you don't have shared language and values, you can't coordinate your actions or agree on what to do."
Paul Pangaro, PhDSystems Disciplines: Table Stakes for 21st Century Organizations
June 6, 2023
