Rosenverse

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
Sam Proulx
To Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Kara Kane
Communities of Practice for Civic Design
2022 • Civic Design Community
Taylor Klassman
Shaping the Next Era of UX Research: Collaborative Forum
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sarah Barrett
AI in Real Life: Using LLMs to Turbocharge Microsoft Learn
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Steve Portigal
Looking Back…to Look Ahead
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
James Wieselman Schulman
Research is a team sport: advancing the work when everyone does the research
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Everything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations
2022 • Civic Design Community
Kit Unger
Theme 2: Introduction
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Lin Nie
When Thought-worlds Collide: Collaborating Between Research and Practice
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Angy Peterson
More Than Technology: Personalized Public Sector Experiences
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Daniel Gloyd
Designing From the Inside Out: How Method Acting Can Inspire Design Research
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Uday Gajendar
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Joseph Williams
Unlocking impact and influence through inclusive hiring in research
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Louis Rosenfeld
About the Rosenverse
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Benjamin Wiedmaier
Redefining Toolkits: Unbundling to Create a Perfect Match
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Matt Bernius
Learnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold

More Videos

Brigette Metzler

"Research ops is not just about delivering efficiency; it’s about creating a map and a vision of research across the whole organization."

Brigette Metzler

Scaling ResearchOps: Helping Researchers do Their Best Work

March 30, 2020

Steve Portigal

"In the moment, it felt really uncomfortable, and I never thought I’d want to share that with anyone."

Steve Portigal Susan Simon-Daniels Tamara Hale Randolph Duke II

War Stories LIVE! Q&A-Discussion

March 30, 2020

Alfred Kahn

"In Procore, design moved from tasting the cake to baking the cake by being involved early in strategy and planning."

Alfred Kahn

A Seat at the Table: Making Your Team a Strategic Partner

November 29, 2023

Catherine Dubut

"We created a simple WordPress site so all corners of the business could contribute and share insights, breaking down silos."

Catherine Dubut

Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design

March 18, 2021

Sofía Delsordo

"We wanted them to see the government not as an old machine, but as people who see themselves as users."

Sofía Delsordo Kassim Vera

Public Policy for Jalisco's Designers to Make Design Matter

December 8, 2021

Alla Weinberg

"If you don’t understand the why, what, and how of change, don’t communicate it — you’ll only cause more stress."

Alla Weinberg

Workers Are Sick of Change: The Cure is Psychological Safety

June 6, 2023

Peter Van Dijck

"Building evals is like building tests to know if your AI system is good enough, and you can rerun them as models improve."

Peter Van Dijck

Designing AI-first products on top of a rapidly evolving technology

June 10, 2025

"We are like three legs of a chair: product, engineer, and UX all contribute to stability."

Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution

December 6, 2022

Bob Baxley

"We have a lot of work to do before we’re ready to put things open source at Best Buy."

Bob Baxley Sara Asche Anderson Sharon Bautista Frank Duran Jamie Kaspszak Abbey Smalley Sylas Souza

Theme 4: Discussion

January 8, 2024