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
Uday Gajendar
The Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Research at an inflection point: Adapting to a new era of collaboration, equity, and innovation
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Libby Maurer
Treating Diversity & Inclusion in Hiring as a Design Problem
2019 • Enterprise Community
Paul Pangaro, PhD
Systems Disciplines: Table Stakes for 21st Century Organizations
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Convergent Research Techniques in Customer Journey Mapping
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Kaaren Hanson
Stop Talking, Start Doing
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Dr Chloe Sharp
Using Evidence and Collaboration for Setting and Defending Priorities
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Benjamin Real
Showing the Value of DesignOps by Not Having a DesignOps Team
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
William Newton
How to Lead With Data, and Without Data
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Margot Bloomstein
Fostering Trust in Your Brand and Beyond
2020 • Enterprise Community
Robert Fabricant
Industry junctures: Paths forwards for UXR and the critical decisions that get us there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Audrey Crane
Shadow Design–Where Else is Design Happening in Your Organization?
2023 • Enterprise Community
Doug Powell
DesignOps and the Next Frontier: Leading Through Unpredictable Change
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Russ Unger
Getting Out from Under Everyone: How to Escape the Paralysis of Getting Started
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Megan Blocker
Getting to the “So What?”: How Management Consulting Practices Can Transform Your Approach to Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold

More Videos

Scher Foord

"Our teams focus on entire customer outcomes, not just features."

Scher Foord Corey Greenltch Sarah Rowe

Turn the Ship Around: How to Apply Design Thinking Across Your Organization

June 10, 2021

Erika Kincaid

"Trust emerges through sharing work, receiving feedback, and trusting those around you to help you grow."

Erika Kincaid Brenna Heaps Jessica Tsukimura

Connecting the Dots: How to Foster Collaboration and Build a Strong Design Review Culture

June 8, 2022

Amy Gawronski Zuccaro

"My job is part therapist. Career development and goals are basically asking what people want to be in five years."

Amy Gawronski Zuccaro

Advice for DesignOps Employee #1

September 29, 2021

Aleksandra Korczynska

"It's almost impossible to do a survey without using some kind of tool nowadays."

Aleksandra Korczynska Caroline Jarrett Justyna Parmee

Survey Tools

March 12, 2026

John Calhoun

"Establishing a design ops practice is not an easy feat."

John Calhoun

Have we Reached Our Peak? Spotting the Next Mountain For DesignOps to Climb

October 1, 2021

Joshua Graves

"Sometimes, avoiding the conversation feels easier but can have bigger costs than facing it."

Joshua Graves

We Need To Talk: Navigating Conversations with Your Boss (Part 1 of 3)

April 14, 2025

Michael Land

"You don’t want so much governance that people can’t be creative, but you need just enough to help their process."

Michael Land

Establishing Design Operations in Government

February 18, 2021

Jill Fruchter

"It’s those value propositions that need to be decoded at the human level and then coded back into the data, not vice versa."

Jill Fruchter

Inconvenient Insights: The Researcher's Role is to Stay Curious

March 29, 2023

Kritika Sony

"Working with AI is a back and forth negotiation, not a vending machine where one prompt gets you the answer."

Kritika Sony

Moving AI offscreen: Exploring failures, constraints, and recovery in physical game design

June 10, 2026