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
Mark Templeton
Creating a Legacy: the ultimate experience
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Sahibzada Mayed
The Politics of Radical Research: A Manifesto
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Kim Lenox
Leading Distributed Global Teams
2019 • Enterprise Community
Ariel Kennan
Theme Two Intro
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Peter Merholz
Design at Scale is People!
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Jose Coronado
People First - Design at JP Morgan
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
John Cutler
The Alignment Trap
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Joshua Graves
We Need To Talk: Addressing Unmet Expectations (Part 2 of 3)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Christopher Geison
Theme 1 Intro
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Christian Crumlish
Afternoon Insights Panel
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
April Reagan
Look, Think, Act: The Futures-Smart Design Organization
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Sam Proulx
Understanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Sarah Alvarado
How to make UX research leadership more effective [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Louis Rosenfeld
Welcome / Housekeeping
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Sylvie Abookire
A Civic Designer's Guide to Mindful Conflict Navigation
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
David Cronin
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold

More Videos

Alla Weinberg

"The workplaces conditions and expectations to perform faster forever are biologically impossible to sustain."

Alla Weinberg

Healing Toxic Stress

September 23, 2024

Meredith Black

"We will not hire an asshole. Culture trumps even exceptional talent."

Meredith Black

Scaling Design Culture

November 6, 2017

Christian Rohrer

"The PURE method measures usability by scoring cognitive load and friction at each step of fundamental user tasks."

Christian Rohrer

Research Operations at Scale

November 7, 2017

John Calhoun

"As your design practice matures, your design ops team will reach inflection points, and it’s okay to flip the coin and explore the other side."

John Calhoun Rachel Posman

Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops

January 8, 2024

Victor Udoewa

"Cultural and experiential knowledge are greater than institutional knowledge."

Victor Udoewa

Radical Participatory Research: Decolonizing Participatory Processes

March 9, 2022

Mansi Gupta

"Men and boys are part of the problem, therefore they must be part of the solution."

Mansi Gupta

Drawing from Feminist Practice to Make Inclusive Design Operational

September 9, 2022

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Innovation is invention multiplied by adoption multiplied by inclusion."

Saara Kamppari-Miller Nicole Bergstrom Shashi Jain

Key Metrics: Comparing Three Letter Acronym Metrics That Include the Word “Key”

November 13, 2024

Rebecca Gimenez

"Service design is still so new that no one really knows what maturity looks like."

Rebecca Gimenez

Work in Progress: Service Design at Airbnb

December 3, 2024

Louis Rosenfeld

"You can change the time zone via a pull-down menu on the program page, and all session times will adjust accordingly."

Louis Rosenfeld

Welcome / Housekeeping

June 7, 2023