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
"User research is not just collecting feedback; it’s a methodical process to avoid bias."
Anna AvrekhUser Research, Design, and Product - A Love Story
March 11, 2021
"Children are advanced in design topics like UX because they see them in their everyday apps and games."
Sofía Delsordo Kassim VeraPublic Policy for Jalisco's Designers to Make Design Matter
December 8, 2021
"FEMA is not going to stand up a UX department; it’s our responsibility to witness and find ways to help."
Emily Danielson“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response
June 9, 2022
"Confluence was great because everybody in the company was already using it, making it a natural place to store research."
Michele MarutResearch Repositories Reconsidered
February 14, 2019
"Making career architectures explicit empowers employees to drive their own growth independent of managerial changes."
Peter MerholzThe Mysterious Case of the Missing UX Career Path
August 25, 2022
"Researchers are in the sense making business—they connect the present to the future, step by step, helping users get what they need."
Dana ChisnellThe Sensemaking Business
March 10, 2026
"Care can go in multiple pathways; it’s not always one-way. There’s multiplicity and duality in how care is practiced."
Sahibzada Mayed Lauren LinCultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration
October 4, 2023
"To have higher impact, see the entire cross-functional team as your team, not silos."
Laurent ChristophScale the impact of DesignOps in 3D: Diligence, Decision, Discipline
September 17, 2025
"We want to stay in the game no users cursing our name."
Ana Maria Montero Barrantes Aditi Dhar Michelle Kaplan Nate Osborne Matt LaurenceThe Authentic UX Talent Show
January 8, 2024
