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.
What co-speech gestures reveal about users’ thinking during interviews
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 service blueprint would have helped show the complex backend systems supporting what looks like a simple user interface."
Davis Neable Guy SegalHow to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team
June 10, 2021
"Attendee cohorts meet daily in small groups with facilitators to share learning goals and deepen engagement."
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Victor Udoewa Jennifer StricklandEverything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations
May 17, 2022
"A strong partnership between design ops and design leadership frees leaders to build relationships and focus on strategic work."
Jose Coronado Julie Gitlin Lawrence LipkinPeople First - Design at JP Morgan
June 10, 2021
"Every project and initiative we launched has been a Trojan horse navigating through dark matter."
Sofía Delsordo Kassim VeraPublic Policy for Jalisco's Designers to Make Design Matter
December 8, 2021
"Personalization is not just a trend; it’s a necessity."
Kristin SkinnerFive Years of DesignOps
September 29, 2021
"It’s important to establish feedback loops so each organizational layer learns from the others continuously."
Anupama DhareshwarFrom blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
November 19, 2025
"Being an essential strategic partner needs visible action and outcomes, not simply evangelism."
Tim ParmeeChanging Our Design Pressure Points
October 2, 2023
"The executive’s interpretation was completely out of line with the customers’ realities."
Robin BeersBeyond Insights: Researchers as Organizational Change Catalysts
March 25, 2024
"Experience Design Methods is tailored for our organization to align research, design, engineering, and product management."
Yunyan Li Anna Le Jen KimUX Best Practices
June 11, 2021
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What new skills or mindsets will workers need in a post-corporate practice economy?
What role do corporations historically play in decoupling labor from local community accountability?
How do organizations integrate customer feedback, survey data, and interview transcripts into a single research repository?