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
Jake Burghardt
Stop wasting research: Unlock more value from research insights
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Dave Malouf
Panel: Design Systems and Documentation
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Surya Vanka
Unleashing Swarm Creativity to Solve Enterprise Challenges
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Michelle Morrison
Practice What You Preach
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Amy Gawronski Zuccaro
Advice for DesignOps Employee #1
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Lona Moore
Scaling Design Beyond Designers
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Florence Okoye
AfroFuturism and UX Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Onur Kocan
Understanding the Strategy for Civic Design in a Complex City: Istanbul
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Brianna Sylver
Lead With Purpose
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Rusha Sopariwala
Remote, Together: Craft and Collaboration Across Disciplines, Borders, Time Zones, and a Design Org of 170+
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Amy Marquez
INVEST: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Leading through the long tail of trauma
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Suzan Bednarz
AccessibilityOps for All
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Key Metrics: Comparing Three Letter Acronym Metrics That Include the Word “Key”
2024 • DesignOps Community
Gonzalo Goyanes
Design ROI: Cover a Little, Get a Lot
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold

More Videos

Robert Schwartz

"We are map makers… helping businesses understand their customers so they don’t make the wrong decisions or end up somewhere they don’t want to be."

Robert Schwartz

We're Here for the Humans

June 9, 2017

Aditi Ruiz

"We each bring different skills, temperaments, and interests, so there’s no one perfect relationship model between roles."

Aditi Ruiz Christian Crumlish Farid Sabitov

Pulse Check: Empathy Mapping Your Product Manager, Pt. 2

December 6, 2022

Sam Proulx

"Accessibility is a spectrum; if frequent tasks require assistance, the product is inaccessible for me."

Sam Proulx

SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population

June 9, 2021

Taylor Jennings

"If we wanted to scale and continue to grow, we were going to need something to help us."

Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex Knoll

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

March 9, 2022

Ned Dwyer

"A strong case highlighting cost savings and efficiencies makes procurement conversations easier."

Ned Dwyer Jadyn Aguilar

The Future of DesignOps is Tool Consolidation

September 23, 2024

Alla Weinberg

"Our nervous system is ancient; it can’t tell the difference between an angry email and a tiger lurking."

Alla Weinberg

Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It

September 9, 2022

Maria Giudice

"Everyone is a designer."

Maria Giudice

Remaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience

June 9, 2016

Ali Jeffery

"When we engage people in the planning process, they take ownership of their city."

Ali Jeffery Sheri Chudow

How DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely

October 22, 2020

Louis Rosenfeld

"If you don’t clarify the roles and who does what, it’s kind of impossible to do anything else."

Louis Rosenfeld Christian Crumlish

Opening Remarks

November 29, 2023