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
"We don’t stand back to reflect, but we can do that reflecting in the moment."
Jen BriselliLearning Is The Engine: Designing & Adapting in a World We Can’t Predict
April 16, 2025
"One design ops person can work for anything from a handful of designers up to 200 designers, which can be quite challenging."
Angelos ArnisState of DesignOps: Learnings from the 2021 Global Report
October 1, 2021
"I felt like a fake when I didn’t know the details of the Earned Income Tax Credit program, but later I dug in hard and changed that."
Crystal PhilcoxThe Many Faces of Operations
November 6, 2017
"Stop being the unquestioning executors of a marketing plan based on 20th century logic and values."
Craig VillamorDesign Systems for Ethical Design
January 26, 2023
"Stakeholder analysis and managing stakeholders is critical in hierarchical cultures to maintain trust."
Megan BlockerA Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps
November 8, 2018
"One designer's security in a dedicated model may be another designer's stagnation."
Alicia MootyDesign Staffing Models
September 30, 2021
"The team doesn’t understand who’s responsible for what or the difference between a design manager and a design lead."
Dianne QueReal Talk: Proving Value through a Scrappy Playbook
October 23, 2019
"For women, they often won’t apply unless they meet all the bullet points in a job description."
Libby MaurerTreating Diversity & Inclusion in Hiring as a Design Problem
December 5, 2019
"Research ops is not just about delivering efficiency; it’s about creating a map and a vision of research across the whole organization."
Brigette MetzlerScaling ResearchOps: Helping Researchers do Their Best Work
March 30, 2020
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What are effective methods to create feedback loops between strategy, orchestration, and implementation teams?
How can ethnographic storytelling contribute to making systems visible in organizations?
How does shifting organizational language from AI as a tool to AI as a way of working reflect cultural maturity?