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
Amber Knabl
Empowering innovation: The critical role of inclusive product development in the AI era
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Sarah Barrett
The "How" of Enterprise Information Architecture
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Crystal Philcox
The Many Faces of Operations
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Mila Kuznetsova
How Lessons Learned from Our Youngest Users Can Help Us Evolve our Practices
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Alison Rand
Scaling Impact with Service Design
2021 • DesignOps Community
Gretchen Anderson
Scaling the Human Center
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Alla Weinberg
Healing Toxic Stress
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Dave Gray
Connection, Community, and the Future of Work
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Josh Clark
Sentient Design: New Design Patterns for New Experiences (3rd of 3 seminars)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Andrew Webster
Scaling Design Capability: How Involved Should You Be?
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Matt Duignan
HITS, Microsoft's internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Emily Danielson
“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Kara Kane
Communities of Practice for Civic Design
2022 • Civic Design Community
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Samuel Proulx
Designing beyond caricatures: Embracing real, diverse user needs
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
How to Identify and Increase your "Experience Quotient"
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold

More Videos

Dr Chloe Sharp

"Upskilling customer success managers and others to help with testing meant we could do far more research than I alone could manage."

Dr Chloe Sharp

Using Evidence and Collaboration for Setting and Defending Priorities

November 29, 2023

Cassandra Piester

"Everyone has thoughts on what their job is, so starting with roles and responsibilities gets quick buy-in."

Cassandra Piester

Developing and Deploying Your Design Operations Strategy

September 24, 2024

Jack Moffett

"Story pointing UX work would help us plan capacity and avoid being surprised by last minute discovery work."

Jack Moffett

SAFe or Sorry?

May 29, 2019

Sheryl Cababa

"Transparency of AI’s confidence has mostly disappeared because generative AI is inherently confident by design."

Sheryl Cababa Ethan Marcotte Milena Pribic

Day 2 Panel

June 5, 2024

Sahibzada Mayed

"Decentralization of power is really important because power impacts how we practice care and collaborate."

Sahibzada Mayed Lauren Lin

Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration

October 4, 2023

Greg Nudelman

"Hands-free control with bots is critical to avoid dangerous distractions, like driving."

Greg Nudelman

Designing Conversational Interfaces

November 14, 2019

Lavy Kumar

"The future of work is about making the user the hero—humans and machines working together."

Lavy Kumar Kat Temple Tara Jensen Jenn Chou

Future of Work

June 9, 2021

Holly Cole

"We created a family by interacting with each other and sharing our problems with work and trying to solve them together."

Holly Cole

Understanding Experiences: When you have to do more than work

November 8, 2018

Bria Alexander

"Please put your dropdown or your personal agenda in your local time zone so there’s no ambiguity."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

October 4, 2023