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
"When fellow co-workers label an individual as difficult, it's hard not to treat that individual as a problem."
Darian DavisLessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
January 8, 2024
"Learning is fractal—self-similar at different scales from individuals to organizations."
Jen BriselliLearning Is The Engine: Designing & Adapting in a World We Can’t Predict
April 16, 2025
"Templates outline workflow models that encourage peer feedback before insights get published to the main hub."
Michelle Bejian Lotia Anne-Marie MorellRolling Out a Repository: How Zapier Centralizes Insights from Across their Organization
March 28, 2023
"We need to create evolving system loops that incorporate feedback and allow our units of one to learn and adapt."
Dave Malouf Adrienne Allnutt Jon Fukuda Dominique WardThe Future of DesignOps
January 8, 2024
"False positives in research give teams misleading evidence that their solutions are working."
Leisa ReicheltThe Five Dysfunctions of Democratized Research at Scale
March 30, 2020
"A great designer doesn’t have all the right answers, they have the right questions."
Erika Kincaid Brenna Heaps Jessica TsukimuraConnecting the Dots: How to Foster Collaboration and Build a Strong Design Review Culture
June 8, 2022
"We made a system that wouldn’t work if any part of the code or any team disappeared or refused to cooperate."
Husani OakleyBias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work
June 14, 2018
"We’re often stuck on a hamster wheel of short-term metrics like daily or monthly active users that don’t capture long-term success."
Amy BucherHarnessing behavioral science to uncover deeper truths
March 12, 2025
"The AI doesn’t train itself; we provide context dynamically, so it enhances answers with curated data."
Louis Rosenfeld Peter Van DijckGenAI for UXers: A Rosenbot Demo and Discussion
September 11, 2025
