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
"AI design tools are great for sketching or inspiration, but designers are never asked to create statistically average designs."
Steve TurbekDesigning Interactive Graphics with AI Code Help
February 5, 2026
"We want it to take two weeks instead of two years for a skilled operator to pilot these new vehicles."
Teresa SwinglerLook, Up in the Sky! UX/UI for Aerospace
October 27, 2022
"Meetings tell us what kind of conversations we are having and what kind of conversations we are not having."
Alla WeinbergHow to Build and Scale Team Safety
January 8, 2024
"Learning as you go is necessary; you won’t complete all your learning before completing a project."
Victor M. GonzalezPracticing Learners and Learning Practitioners
March 10, 2021
"AI is a great automated assist, but it is not yet an insight generator like we hope for in UX research."
Louis Rosenfeld Billy Carlson Jon Fukuda Maria TaylorHow AI will Change DesignOps Tooling
October 3, 2023
"If executives are responsible for the why and managers are responsible for the what, then directors are responsible for the how."
Peter MerholzThe Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX
July 13, 2023
"We want to build consultants who can solve problems across a variety of projects and clients."
Ignacio MartinezFair and Effective Designer Evaluation
September 25, 2024
"For every single component, we start with its purpose and emergent need to ground design in user experience."
Dave Malouf Amy ThibodeauPanel: Design Systems and Documentation
November 7, 2017
"The design mindset was way more important than the bureaucratic mindset."
Sofía Delsordo Kassim VeraPublic Policy for Jalisco's Designers to Make Design Matter
December 8, 2021
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What does James mean by contrasting doom scrolling with active hope in the context of UX research?
What role does co-creation play in uncovering gaps and opportunities between collaborating organizations?
What practical practices can make accessibility a sustainable part of daily design and development workflows?