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
"A Facebook group became a primary communication channel where parents post both praise and complaints."
Sarah AuslanderIncremental Steps to Drive Radical Innovation in Policy Design
November 18, 2022
"No matter what the size of your design team is the goal should be the same: retain and empower designers by providing resources they need to grow."
Kate SternScaling Learning for the Future
September 9, 2022
"Today’s speakers come from real world companies facing real consequences for their choices about AI."
Llewyn PaineDay 1 Using AI in UX with Impact
June 10, 2025
"Destiny is the belief that a certain future outcome is predetermined regardless of the path."
Nicole AleongFuture Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology
March 26, 2024
"AI models hallucinate when they fail, they fail unpredictably."
Anupama DhareshwarFrom blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
November 19, 2025
"Shared tools have a lot of benefits, including streamlining license management and enabling us to test out processes efficiently."
Ivana NgLevel Up Your Program with ProductOps
January 8, 2024
"Some of the same things that help you scale can also feel like they get in your way."
Melissa Schmidt Adam MenterHow UX Research Hit It Big in Las Vegas
June 4, 2019
"Design is about creating that shared space where we look at problems through different lenses."
Brian T. O’Neill Maria Cipollone Luis Colin Manuel Dahm Mike OrenDoes Designing and Researching Data Products Powered by ML/AI and Analytics Call for New UX Methods?
February 18, 2022
"AI tools are incentivized to produce final deliverables, but that’s an output, not the essence of research."
Laura KleinHuman vs. machine: Testing AI’s ability to synthesize and analyze research
March 11, 2026
