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
Joshua Graves
We Need To Talk: Addressing Unmet Expectations (Part 2 of 3)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Louis Rosenfeld
Opening Remarks
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Kit Unger
Theme 2: Introduction
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Scher Foord
Turn the Ship Around: How to Apply Design Thinking Across Your Organization
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Christian Crumlish
From tools to staff: What the next generation of agents means for the future of design
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Conference
Ovetta Sampson
Managing the Human Engagement Risks of AI
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi
Contextuality problem: Exploring the Benefits of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
2023 • QuantQual Interest Group
Ari Zelmanow
Dark Side of Democratization
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Dalia El-Shimy
So You've Got a Seat at the Table. Now What?
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Sarah Gallimore
Inspire Progress with Artifacts from the Future
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Enterprise Community
Zariah Cameron
Streamlining an Inclusive Design Practice
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Etienne Fang
Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform
2019 • Advancing Research Community
John Calhoun
Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Sean McKay
Coexisting with non-researchers: Practical strategies for a democratized research future
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold

More Videos