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
Dane DeSutter
Beyond the Console: The rise of the Gamer Experience and how gaming will impact UX Research across industries
2024 • QuantQual Interest Group
Megan Blocker
Theme 2 Intro
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Broad Strokes: Connecting Design, Research, and AI to the World Around Us
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Greg Petroff
Design is the Differentiator: Bringing New Design Innovations to a Very Antiquated and Very Large Industry
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Jilanna Wilson
Distributed Design Operations Management
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 3: Introduction
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
David Cronin
The GE Design System and Thoughts about Craft at Scale
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Mansi Gupta
Advancing the Inclusion of Womxn in Research Practices
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Louis Rosenfeld
About the Rosenverse
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Scher Foord
Turn the Ship Around: How to Apply Design Thinking Across Your Organization
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Frances Yllana
D.E.A.R.R. Diaries (Discipline, Experience, Architecture, Reflection + Revolution)
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 3: Understand AI architectures: RAG, Agents, Oh My!
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Soma Ghosh
What emerging methods are advancing UX research [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Chris Hodowanec
Agile + User Experience: How to navigate the Agile landscape as an UX Practitioner
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Jodi Forlizzi
Design and AI innovation
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold

More Videos

Laureen Kattan

"We created a change log to document roadmap and user story map updates due to evolving requirements and regulations."

Laureen Kattan Julie Kim

Centering Patients and Clinicians in a Complex Government Ecosystem

November 29, 2023

Prayag Narula

"Good designers understand you can’t design what you don’t understand."

Prayag Narula

How to Empower Your Designers to Do Good Research – And Why You Want To

June 10, 2022

Susan Simon-Daniels

"By taking a moment to pause to just let people be people, we could allow the interview to resume with some dignity and purpose."

Susan Simon-Daniels

War Stories LIVE! Susan Simon-Daniels

March 30, 2020

Helen Armstrong

"Working with AI is a lot less like working with another human and more like working with some weird force of nature."

Helen Armstrong

Augment the Human. Interrogate the System.

June 7, 2023

Sam Ladner

"If you’re a Theory X manager, you believe work is something people hate and must be controlled."

Sam Ladner

Data Exhaust and Personal Data: Learning from Consumer Products to Enhance Enterprise UX

June 8, 2016

Dan Willis

"The only time you get to build design ops at the same time as the organization structure is like in startups, but they’re so chaotic you don’t get to enjoy it."

Dan Willis

Filling the Void

November 7, 2018

Dharani Perera

"Stakeholders began referring to user groups by name—humanizing conversations and keeping us focused."

Dharani Perera

The mandala of service design: unlocking alignment and action through service design

November 20, 2025

Kara Kane

"There is no such thing as a self-organized community; they just don’t work and fall apart without leadership."

Kara Kane

Communities of Practice for Civic Design

April 7, 2022

Ana Maria Montero Barrantes

"The only rule is to maintain your smile and just to feel the being that have fun."

Ana Maria Montero Barrantes Aditi Dhar Michelle Kaplan Nate Osborne Matt Laurence

The Authentic UX Talent Show

January 8, 2024