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
Sheryl Cababa
Living in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Sara Asche Anderson
Not Your Ordinary Re-Brand: Design's Path to Driving Customer Obsession at Best Buy
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Jeff Gothelf
The Intersection of Lean and Design
2019 • Enterprise Community
Mitchell Bernstein
Organizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Jason Mesut
Shaping design, designers and teams
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
April Reagan
Look, Think, Act: The Futures-Smart Design Organization
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Alla Weinberg
Healing Toxic Stress
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Sean McKay
Coexisting with non-researchers: Practical strategies for a democratized research future
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Séamus Byrne
Aligning Teams with Choreography
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Sam Yen
Driving Organizational Change Through Design? Do more of this and less of that
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Greg Petroff
Everything is About to Change: Software as Material
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Emily Danielson
“I mean, I can lift a shovel”: Design Skills in Disaster Response
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Sarah Kinkade
Design Management Models in the Face of Transformation
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Michele Marut
Research Repositories Reconsidered
2019 • DesignOps Community
Sharbani Dhar
Breathing Room for Delight
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold

More Videos

Darian Davis

"When fellow co-workers label an individual as difficult, it's hard not to treat that individual as a problem."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Jen Briselli

"Learning is fractal—self-similar at different scales from individuals to organizations."

Jen Briselli

Learning Is The Engine: Designing & Adapting in a World We Can’t Predict

April 16, 2025

Michelle Bejian Lotia

"Templates outline workflow models that encourage peer feedback before insights get published to the main hub."

Michelle Bejian Lotia Anne-Marie Morell

Rolling Out a Repository: How Zapier Centralizes Insights from Across their Organization

March 28, 2023

Dave Malouf

"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 Ward

The Future of DesignOps

January 8, 2024

Leisa Reichelt

"False positives in research give teams misleading evidence that their solutions are working."

Leisa Reichelt

The Five Dysfunctions of Democratized Research at Scale

March 30, 2020

Erika Kincaid

"A great designer doesn’t have all the right answers, they have the right questions."

Erika Kincaid Brenna Heaps Jessica Tsukimura

Connecting the Dots: How to Foster Collaboration and Build a Strong Design Review Culture

June 8, 2022

Husani Oakley

"We made a system that wouldn’t work if any part of the code or any team disappeared or refused to cooperate."

Husani Oakley

Bias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work

June 14, 2018

Amy Bucher

"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 Bucher

Harnessing behavioral science to uncover deeper truths

March 12, 2025

Louis Rosenfeld

"The AI doesn’t train itself; we provide context dynamically, so it enhances answers with curated data."

Louis Rosenfeld Peter Van Dijck

GenAI for UXers: A Rosenbot Demo and Discussion

September 11, 2025