Rosenverse

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
Jemma Ahmed
Theme Three Intro
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Robert Schwartz
We're Here for the Humans
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building the Rosenbot
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Jaime Creixems
Best Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Leisa Reichelt
The Five Dysfunctions of Democratized Research at Scale
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Adam Thomas
Survival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Amy Paris
Delivering Equity: Government Services for All Ages, Languages, Sexual Orientations, and Gender Identities
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Andreas Huebner
What Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Alissa Briggs
How to Coach Enterprise Experimentation
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Jason Mesut
Shaping design, designers and teams
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Prayag Narula
HCI 2.0: Humanity Deserves the Attention that UX Research has to Offer
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Katie Hansen
Experimental research: techniques for deep, psychology-driven insights
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Aurobinda Pradhan
Introduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Welcome / Housekeeping
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Nicole Bergstrom
AccessibilityOps: Moving beyond “nice to have”
2024 • DesignOps Community

More Videos

Taylor Jennings

"Setting up a repository as a team of one or two is actually the prime time to establish processes like that."

Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex Knoll

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

March 9, 2022

Sam Proulx

"When you design for the edges, you get the middle for free."

Sam Proulx

Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate

September 8, 2022

Russ Unger

"Content designers make a significant difference; if the US government values content, why don’t other organizations?"

Russ Unger

Getting Out from Under Everyone: How to Escape the Paralysis of Getting Started

June 8, 2016

Jemma Ahmed

"This transformation is a win-win: we demonstrate solid business value and serve people and stories in more ethical and impactful ways."

Jemma Ahmed Megan Blocker Eduardo Ortiz

Redefining the research toolkit: Expanding methodologies for a changing world

March 12, 2025

Sam Proulx

"Lack of confidence caused by unlabeled or difficult controls often leads assistive tech users to give up on purchases."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

March 28, 2023

Tricia Wang

"The user identity is a digital construct that commodifies humans for their data."

Tricia Wang

From Users to Shapers of AI: The Future of Research

March 25, 2024

Alana Washington

"Without physical health, we cannot have creative health, and then we cannot have organizational health."

Alana Washington

Theme 1: Introduction and Provocation

January 8, 2024

Doug Powell

"Good design is good business."

Doug Powell

Closing Keynote: Design at Scale

November 8, 2018

Christian Crumlish

"I feel a lot of pain and anxiety in the community people wondering, you know is our seat at the table slipping away."

Christian Crumlish

Introduction by our Conference Chair

December 6, 2022