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
"Design ops professionals are already futurists in disguise because they constantly manage risks and plan capacity."
April ReaganLook, Think, Act: The Futures-Smart Design Organization
October 1, 2021
"Multilingual embedding models can cluster similar meanings across languages in a shared latent space."
Ian JohnsonLatent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data
June 11, 2025
"The biggest struggle was recruiting and scheduling participants, so we started a shared Google sheet."
Liza Pemstein Jane DavisScaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever
March 27, 2023
"We must put our citizens at the center of every service."
Ariel KennanBuilding a Design Culture
June 9, 2017
"When you design for the edges, you get the middle for free."
Samuel ProulxInvisible barriers: Why accessible service design can’t be an afterthought
December 3, 2024
"Systems thinking is a mindset that extends your perspective beyond the immediate problem to see interconnections and consequences."
Sheryl Cababa Alexis OhThinking in systems to address climate with Sheryl Cababa
June 12, 2024
"City Hall is often risk-averse, and professionals of color face extra penalties for taking risks in their careers."
Justin Entzminger Terrance Smith Tracy M. Colunga Mai-Ling GarciaRisk and Reward: How to Diversify the Field of Civic Innovators and Designers
November 17, 2022
"Planned right and managed right is the key to designing it right, not just designing the right thing and building it right."
Ellie Krysl Jon FukudaPlanned Right. Managed Right. Designed Right.
June 6, 2023
"Find a mentor—an AI, a person, or a project—and use community resources like Open Austin to learn and grow."
Bryce Benton[Demo] AI-powered UX enhancement: Aligning GitHub documentation with USWDS at Austin Public Library
June 4, 2024
