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
"Faith in the black box makes me uneasy; as designers, we must care about what happens behind the scenes."
Cennydd Bowles Dan Rosenberg Lisa WelchmanDay 1 Panel
June 4, 2024
"Robust action means making early moves to preserve flexibility and open up opportunity, not trying to forecast 50 steps ahead."
Peter LevinSolve a Problem Here, Transform a Strategy There: Research as an Occasion for Expanding Organizational Possibility
March 25, 2024
"Many times when planning to hire, we first assess our team competencies to identify the necessary talent."
Ebru NamaldiDesigning the Designer’s Journey: Scaling Teams, Culture, and Growth Through DesignOps
September 11, 2025
"The conference is not an endpoint, but a path to broadening our understanding of designing with AI."
Uday Gajendar Louis RosenfeldDay 1 Welcome
June 4, 2024
"Within IBM Watson, we prefer the term augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence to emphasize support, not takeover."
Raven VealDark Metrics: Illuminating the Negative Impact of Digital Health Design
March 12, 2021
"Don't just flip the switch and say go talk to customers; you have to set guardrails and train people."
Janelle EstesUX Research Trends
January 28, 2021
"I haven’t gone more than one day without seeing a new gen AI tool that promises to do it all with a single prompt."
Maverick Chan Claire LinFrom Doodle to Demo: AI as Our Storytelling Partner
October 23, 2025
"Designers are the most insecure function in many companies because their role—to represent people's needs—is both critical and ambiguous."
Tricia WangThe most popular design thinking strategy is BS
January 27, 2022
"Never build or buy an everything chat bot again; start with less ambiguous, targeted AI experiences."
Sarah BarrettAI in Real Life: Using LLMs to Turbocharge Microsoft Learn
February 13, 2025