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
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
"I had a hunger for process and efficiency once I built a feedback bot to share customer insights."
Liza Pemstein Jane DavisScaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever
March 27, 2023
"For users with physical challenges, hover states can be very difficult, especially for eye, head tracking, or voice control users."
Sam ProulxPrototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
December 8, 2021
"Science cultures like CERN have a huge headwind against adopting design measurement tools because of skepticism."
Panel Discussion: Communicating the Value of DesignOps
November 7, 2018
"Extractive, commercially-driven communities aren’t really communities in the pure sense."
James LangIf you can design an app, you can design a community
May 22, 2025
"Co-creation is highly actionable for teams and genuinely engaging for customers."
Dagmara KukawkaTiny team, moonshot impact: Democratizing research across continents
March 10, 2026
"How AI is built and used impacts the human experience at the other end of the screen."
Husani OakleyTheme Three Intro
June 6, 2023
"Domain experts are crucial for tagging data because users might say ‘that’s great,’ but experts can tell it’s totally wrong."
Peter Van DijckBuilding impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 2: Evals are your moat
July 23, 2025
"Program managers are just expense of routers—what they missed was the how, that secret sauce of EQ."
Indra KlavinsA Design Ops Girl in a Dev Ops World
October 23, 2019
"Space has meaning in a map — moving components changes the map's meaning, unlike diagrams where space is arbitrary."
Simon WardleyMaps and Topographical Intelligence
January 31, 2019
