Rosenverse
What co-speech gestures reveal about users’ thinking during interviews

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
Yunyan Li
UX Best Practices
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Megan Nipe
Human-Centered Design for Engagement: Maturing from Newsletterville to Personalized, One-to-One Messaging
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Dave Hora
Research in the Face of Complexity: New Sensibility for New Situations
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Steve Turbek
Designing Interactive Graphics with AI Code Help
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Dan Willis
Filling the Void
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Billy Carlson
Principles of Team Wireframing
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Samuel Martin
Co-Design vs Faux-Design: Navigating the Complexities of Sharing Power in Co-Design
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Matt Bernius
Trauma-informed Research: A Panel Discussion
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Frances Yllana
The Big Question about Impact: A Panel Discussion
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Jason Mesut
Unmasking Design Leadership: Navigating leadership without neglecting ourselves
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Peter Merholz
Design at Scale is People!
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Setting the Table for Dynamic Change
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Kara Kane
Theme One Intro
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Dean Broadley
Not Black Enough to be White
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Vitorio Miliano
Don’t call it AI: Turn words into numbers with quantitative ethnography
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Shelby Switzer
Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold

More Videos

Jess Greco

"Changing outcomes means changing incentives on all fronts to shift the culture effectively."

Jess Greco

Creating a Basis for Change: Scaling Design Maturity

June 8, 2022

Julie Baher

"When I first got to Citrix, people didn’t even know we had a design team."

Julie Baher

Culture Change—My Journey

May 14, 2015

Mark Interrante

"Side-pav proposals answer what’s going on, why it matters now, what you propose, what action to take, and what benefit comes from it."

Mark Interrante

Collaboration Flows in Product Development

June 9, 2017

Maggie Dieringer

"Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again."

Maggie Dieringer

Creating Consistency Through Constant Change

January 8, 2024

Husani Oakley

"X is going to change everything. Sometimes it’s true, and sometimes it’s just hype."

Husani Oakley

Theme Three Intro

June 6, 2023

Sharon Banh

"We need to develop a theory of how research work unfolds in the organization to be proactive and opinionated partners."

Sharon Banh Dave Hora Marieke McCloskey Alicia Zhong

Reimagining research: What does the field need to grow? [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

October 16, 2024

Megan Blocker

"Sometimes it's just not even related to the research skills, sometimes relationships really matter."

Megan Blocker Mujtaba Hameed Victor Udoewa

Panel: Excellence in Impact

March 25, 2024

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Representing a person as a circle feels more right—like we’re all equidistant at the same table."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Cartography for Design Communities

September 10, 2025

Bria Alexander

"We need standardized role definitions, not everyone is a manager just because they manage initiatives - Peter Bosma."

Bria Alexander Patrizia Bertini Peter Boersma Jon Fukuda Dave Malouf Theresa Slate Changying (Z) Zheng

Charting the future of DesignOps: A community workshop

April 18, 2024