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.
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
"Using program dollars to hire freelancers helped me avoid difficult conversations with HR and finance early on."
Sarah Kinkade Mariana Ortiz-ReyesDesign Management Models in the Face of Transformation
June 8, 2022
"VoiceOver gestures like swipe right move the focus through elements; double tap activates them."
Sam ProulxUnderstanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
October 2, 2023
"When we train AI on what we have done in the past, we will just do the same more efficiently, not better."
Samuel ProulxFrom Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins
November 19, 2025
"A lot of times those data streams are acting somewhat independently."
Brad Peters Anne MamaghaniShort Take #1: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
December 6, 2022
"When I let my outside interest in, I suddenly had really memorable conversations with people."
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
June 3, 2019
"Who needs a designer when we have generative AI?"
Jon FukudaTheme One Intro
October 2, 2023
"We enable employees to provide unlimited comments which we analyze with Amazon Comprehend for sentiment."
Adel Du ToitGet Your CFO To Say: 'Our Strategic Goal is User Obsession'
June 10, 2022
"When operations do their job well, people don’t even know it exists until something breaks."
Changying (Z) ZhengPractical DesignOps: From Ideas to Tools That Teams Actually Use
September 25, 2025
"Teams only think about a specific customer obsession persona and lose sight of upstream or downstream effects and other personas."
Kit Unger Jackie Ho Veevi Rosenstein Vasileios XanthopoulosTheme 2: Discussion
January 8, 2024
