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.
What co-speech gestures reveal about users’ thinking during interviews
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
"Sometimes it is hard to articulate what you looked at, but eye tracking makes it measurable and objective."
Jeff Ephraim Bander Ariane Rahn Philipp ReiterEye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research
March 11, 2022
"Embracing AI’s weirdness can turn unpredictable outputs into experience assets rather than liabilities."
Josh Clark Veronika KindredSentient Design: New Postures for AI-Mediated Experiences (2nd of 3 seminars)
January 29, 2025
"Our technical leads started attending other teams’ meetings, helping break down integration barriers."
Carl TurnerYou Can Do This: Understand and Solve Organizational Problems to Jumpstart a Dead Project
March 28, 2023
"Situational use cases help us consider the realities outside the business problem that impact user success."
Megan Clegg Michael Haggerty-Villa Alexis MorinSpace for Everyone: Reframing Accessibility Through a Wider Lens
June 10, 2021
"Diagrams provide transparency in the face of uncertainty by showing what there is to know, even if the news is not good."
Abby CovertStuck? Diagrams Help
October 27, 2022
"Often, the best tool for everything in design ops is a spreadsheet."
John Calhoun Rachel PosmanBring your DesignOps Story to Life! The Definitive DesignOps Book Jam
October 3, 2023
"People don’t resist change to be difficult, but out of very natural responses to uncertainty threatening their financial future."
Steve BatyBreaking Out of Ruts: Tips for Overcoming the Fear of Change
June 9, 2016
"I believed we could do more — more for the company, customers, stakeholders, and ourselves if we had more agency."
Nalini KotamrajuResearch After UX
March 25, 2024
"Feeding interview data into ChatGPT helped us develop realistic character profiles and dialogues."
Maverick Chan Claire LinFrom Doodle to Demo: AI as Our Storytelling Partner
October 23, 2025
