Rosenverse
What co-speech gestures reveal about users’ thinking during interviews

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
Matt Bernius
Trauma-informed Research: A Panel Discussion
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Dan Mall
“Ask Me Anything” with Dan Mall, Author of Upcoming Rosenfeld Title, Design that Scales
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Patrizia Bertini
Pushing DesignOps’ Influence into New Global Markets
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Dan Saffer
Why AI projects fail (and what we can do about it)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jenny Price
From Tradition to Transformation: Unlocking Startup Agility in a Legacy Enterprise
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Jonathon Colman
How to Maximize the Impact of Content Design
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Josina Vink
Navigating the pitfalls of systems thinking in service design
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Jon White
Unsticking Research for Better Information Flow
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Gina Mendolia
Coordinated collaboration: a Service Design & DesignOps love story
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Harry Brignull
Beyond Clicks and Tricks: Why deceptive design has grown into a regulatory faultline
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Lavrans Løvlie
Ask me anything – Authors of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Christopher Taylor Edwards
Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks Day 2
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Sabrina Mach
How to Design Your Design Operating Model
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Tristin Oldani
Learning the Part I Used to Hand Off: How Building the Systems Made Me a Better Designer
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Jen Cardello
Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold

More Videos

Sam Proulx

"More ways to contact support—chat, email, phone—are essential because different disabilities require different options."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

June 7, 2023

Lily Aduana

"Professional testers are very crafty; one even changed her name repeatedly to get recruited multiple times."

Lily Aduana Savannah Hobbs Brittany Rutherford

5 Reasons to Bring Your Recruiting in-House (and How To Do It)

March 12, 2021

Erika Flowers

"Hope is the only thing that lets the conversation continue and reach forward."

Erika Flowers

AI-Readiness: Preparing NASA for a Data-Driven, Agile Future

June 10, 2025

Joerg Beringer

"This is pure context information, not requirements yet, but it’s structured and detailed for design."

Joerg Beringer Thomas Geis

Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes

June 10, 2025

Chris Hodowanec

"It’s really helpful to ask for meeting agendas in advance to attend only ceremonies where UX dependencies exist."

Chris Hodowanec

Agile + User Experience: How to navigate the Agile landscape as an UX Practitioner

November 16, 2022

Deanna Washington

"Design language is probably the worst language possible to speak because it’s so comfortable and confusing."

Deanna Washington Tim Allen Jeff Courcelle John Maeda Matt Raw Erica Tjader

Scaling Success: Paving the Path from DesignOps to VP

October 4, 2023

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"The guiding question I’ve adopted is who might we be excluding now."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Theme Three Intro

September 9, 2022

Ted Booth

"Start with yourself. It’s a great place to get a hypothesis, and then prove yourself wrong or right."

Ted Booth Sam Ladner Fredrik Matheson Russ Unger

Discussion

June 8, 2016

Peter Morville

"Changing culture is hard because we’re willing to change actions but resistant to changing beliefs."

Peter Morville

The Architecture of Understanding

May 13, 2015