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
"An OKR coach told us to think of OKRs like a health panel at a physical—you have KPIs for status and OKRs for change targets."
Bria Alexander Benson Low Natalya Pemberton Stephanie GoldthorpeOKRs—Helpful or Harmful?
January 20, 2022
"Designers embedded in teams often feel lonely and their work leads to fractured user experiences."
Peter MerholzCustomer-Centered Design Organizations
June 8, 2017
"It’s much easier to classify an answer than to generate an answer, and that’s why LLM as a judge works."
Peter Van DijckBuilding impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 2: Evals are your moat
July 23, 2025
"We gave cash prizes for the best overall design pattern, most research, or most timely contributions to keep people engaged."
Eniola OluwoleLessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site
October 24, 2019
"Connecting each budget request to your organization’s strategic goals signals seriousness and can raise important conversations."
Nathan ShedroffDouble Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically
March 31, 2020
"You gotta assume your bot is going to fail and design from zero."
Greg NudelmanDesigning Conversational Interfaces
November 14, 2019
"Design systems has always been a beginning, like a seed, and design ops basically serves as the nurture."
George Abraham Stefan IvanovDesign Systems To-Go: Introducing a Starter Design System, and Indigo.Design Overview (Part 1)
September 30, 2021
"You can change the conference time zone to your local time zone in the upper right corner so there’s no confusion about start times."
Louis Rosenfeld Bria AlexanderDay 1 Welcome
September 23, 2024
"You can't just expect insights to solve themselves if people don't know about them."
Jake BurghardtFinding More Inroads into Research Impact
February 20, 2026