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
John Donmoyer
Shipping your code generation experiments to production
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Shreya Dhawan
Making service tangible: the fastest path to higher performance
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Llewyn Paine
[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Dolly Parikh
Exit Interview #7: Journey of a Social Entrepreneur
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Maverick Chan
From Doodle to Demo: AI as Our Storytelling Partner
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Taiye Akin-Akinyosoye
Amplifying voices and enhancing user research through group interviews
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Iulia Cornigeanu
QuantQual Book Club: Small Data
2024 • QuantQual Interest Group
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi
Contextuality problem: Exploring the Benefits of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
2023 • QuantQual Interest Group
Peter Boersma
How to Define and Maintain a DesignOps Roadmap
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Ariel Kennan
Theme 2 Intro
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Ned Dwyer
The Future of DesignOps is Tool Consolidation
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
Bridge Building across Research Disciplines
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Josh Clark
Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Marieke McCloskey
User Science: Product Analytics & User Research
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Dan Hill
Designing for the infrastructures of everyday life
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold

More Videos

Meredith Black

"Design Ops people are always kind of in the background, wanting to help and nurture."

Meredith Black Elyse Hornbacher

Building Community and Common Trends to Look for in 2021

December 17, 2020

Jorge Arango

"Keeping large content repositories organized is an ongoing challenge that often gets deprioritized."

Jorge Arango

Scale Smart: AI-Powered Content Organization Strategies

September 24, 2024

Chris Engledowl

"It is better to partner with someone who has quantitative expertise to interpret internal structure analyses."

Chris Engledowl

A Mixed Method Approach to Validity to Help Build Trust

April 28, 2023

Kate Kalcevich

"AI-generated images often have no racial diversity and show inaccurate assistive device representation."

Kate Kalcevich

Designing inclusively with AI

June 5, 2024

Jennifer Bolduc

"We need to redesign work and meetings with the newness of hybrid work in mind, it’s a new experiment."

Jennifer Bolduc Diane Gregorio Emily Day

What's involved with getting people back to work?: A panel discussion

July 1, 2021

Amy Marquez

"You have to understand how the business actually makes money to align UX with it."

Amy Marquez

INVEST: Discussion

June 15, 2018

Sarah Auslander

"Cross-departmental cooperation helped redesign playgrounds with features that support early brain development."

Sarah Auslander

Incremental Steps to Drive Radical Innovation in Policy Design

November 18, 2022

Yolanda Rankin

"Designing technology from the perspective of what matters to Black women is just as important as for any other social group."

Yolanda Rankin

Black Feminist Epistemology as a Critical Framework for Equitable Design

March 11, 2021

Brigette Metzler

"Researchers are often nervous about their research being used in the wrong way, so trust and communication matter."

Brigette Metzler Dana Chrisfield

Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community

August 27, 2020