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
Dana Bishop
2022: The Year UX Demonstrates its Business Impact
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Rima Campbell
Increase Productivity and Drive Business Impact
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Wendy Johansson
Design at Scale: Behind the Scenes
2021 • Enterprise Community
Matt Bernius
Learnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Sha Hwang
The First Fifty Years of Civic Design
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
John Calhoun
Have we Reached Our Peak? Spotting the Next Mountain For DesignOps to Climb
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Alan Williams
Designing essential financial services for those in need
2022 • Civic Design Community
Tricia Wang
The most popular design thinking strategy is BS
2022 • Enterprise Community
Dave Hoffer
UX Job Search AMA #2 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Alexandra Schmidt
Enterprise UX Playbook
2022 • Enterprise Community
Wendy Johansson
An Education on Design Education for Orgs
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Katie Johnson
Disrupting generative AI products with just-in-time consumer insights
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi
Contextuality problem: Exploring the Benefits of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
2023 • QuantQual Interest Group
Leisa Reichelt
The Five Dysfunctions of Democratized Research at Scale
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Lisanne Norman
Why I Left Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Maria Skaaden
Panel Discussion: Methodologies and Work Environments
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold

More Videos

Dan Saffer

"Welcome to the AI party, we've got 10 years of research to share."

Dan Saffer

Why AI projects fail (and what we can do about it)

May 14, 2025

Erin Weigel

"Increasing page load time by three seconds can nullify all your design improvements."

Erin Weigel

UX Lessons from running more than 1,200 A/B Tests

July 10, 2024

Jon Fukuda

"You can be right without making others wrong by telling a story that respects their worldview."

Jon Fukuda

Storytelling for DesignOps

August 17, 2023

Cassini Nazir

"Designing and researching wisdom is a dialogue, not a monologue."

Cassini Nazir Meah Lin

The Dangers of Empathy: Toward More Responsible Design Research

March 27, 2023

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

"Minimizing harm protects institutions, not people."

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

The power to heal and harm

March 13, 2025

Alan Williams

"Benefits information really complex. Making them accessible is god's work in effect."

Alan Williams Rose Deeb

Designing essential financial services for those in need

February 10, 2022

Dan Ward

"Failure is when effort did not produce the desired result, not putting in the effort in the first place."

Dan Ward

Failure Friday #1 with Dan Ward

February 7, 2025

Yalenka Mariën

"There’s no magic solution for digital exclusion; small complementary efforts can make significant impact."

Yalenka Mariën Marie Mervaillie

Designing for Digital Inclusion in the Belgian Government

December 8, 2021

Erin Weigel

"If an experiment I design made the front page news tomorrow, how would I feel about it?"

Erin Weigel

Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact

July 24, 2024