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.
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
"Vanity metrics paint a nice picture, but they don’t give you the full story or context behind the numbers."
Iulia CornigeanuQuantQual Book Club: Small Data
March 8, 2024
"Great stories travel through organizations freely when they connect to what really moves and motivates people."
Bas Raijmakers, PhD (RCA) Charley Scull Prabhas PokharelWhat Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
March 11, 2022
"Organizational change is less about the what and more about the how, showing the organization how to change."
Alana Washington(Remote) Service Design: A Transformation Case Study
June 8, 2022
"There’s no magic solution for digital exclusion; small complementary efforts can make significant impact."
Yalenka Mariën Marie MervaillieDesigning for Digital Inclusion in the Belgian Government
December 8, 2021
"This DP&M tool is not just another knowledge base, it’s a living database that supports managing relationships and parsing information into views tailored to user roles."
Ellie Krysl Jon FukudaPlanned Right. Managed Right. Designed Right.
June 6, 2023
"The Homeowner Playbook helped align teams across product, marketing, and operations by giving everyone a shared research fact understanding."
Katie HansenFinding the unknown in the known: Harnessing meta-analysis and literature review
March 12, 2025
"While we love Guy Fieri, we prefer to watch him on Food Network and not experience our own version of Triple D any longer."
Sean Fitzell Sarah Han Kayla FarrellCraft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps
March 12, 2021
"There isn’t a pipeline problem; there are people out there—you have to invest in networking and recruiting properly."
Lisanne NormanWhy I Left Research
March 27, 2023
"There has to be some connection between our results and how our partners see the value in it."
Dr. Jamika D. Burge Jemma Ahmed Chris GeisonBridge Building across Research Disciplines
August 26, 2021
