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
Roberta Dombrowski
5 Reasons to Bring your Recruiting in House
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Prayag Narula
Empowering Designers to do Good Research
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Alla Weinberg
Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Dave Malouf
The Future of DesignOps
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Niko Laitinen
Adaptable Org Design for Resilient Times
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Juhan Sonin
Design Now! The Agenda for Action
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Panel Discussion: Communicating the Value of DesignOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Xenia Adjoubei
Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Chris Govias
Perspectives on Civic Design
2021 • Civic Design Community
Megan Kierstead
You Are a Badass at UX: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Natalia Radywyl
Co-Designing New Power in Australia's Public Sector
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Uday Gajendar
Day 2 Welcome
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Jorge Arango
Design as an Antidote to VUCA
2019 • Enterprise Community
Robin Beers
Beyond Insights: Researchers as Organizational Change Catalysts
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Samuel Proulx
Designing beyond caricatures: Embracing real, diverse user needs
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold

More Videos

Sarah Auslander

"A Facebook group became a primary communication channel where parents post both praise and complaints."

Sarah Auslander

Incremental Steps to Drive Radical Innovation in Policy Design

November 18, 2022

Kate Stern

"No matter what the size of your design team is the goal should be the same: retain and empower designers by providing resources they need to grow."

Kate Stern

Scaling Learning for the Future

September 9, 2022

Llewyn Paine

"Today’s speakers come from real world companies facing real consequences for their choices about AI."

Llewyn Paine

Day 1 Using AI in UX with Impact

June 10, 2025

Nicole Aleong

"Destiny is the belief that a certain future outcome is predetermined regardless of the path."

Nicole Aleong

Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology

March 26, 2024

Anupama Dhareshwar

"AI models hallucinate when they fail, they fail unpredictably."

Anupama Dhareshwar

From blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services

November 19, 2025

Ivana Ng

"Shared tools have a lot of benefits, including streamlining license management and enabling us to test out processes efficiently."

Ivana Ng

Level Up Your Program with ProductOps

January 8, 2024

Melissa Schmidt

"Some of the same things that help you scale can also feel like they get in your way."

Melissa Schmidt Adam Menter

How UX Research Hit It Big in Las Vegas

June 4, 2019

Brian T. O’Neill

"Design is about creating that shared space where we look at problems through different lenses."

Brian T. O’Neill Maria Cipollone Luis Colin Manuel Dahm Mike Oren

Does Designing and Researching Data Products Powered by ML/AI and Analytics Call for New UX Methods?

February 18, 2022

Laura Klein

"AI tools are incentivized to produce final deliverables, but that’s an output, not the essence of research."

Laura Klein

Human vs. machine: Testing AI’s ability to synthesize and analyze research

March 11, 2026