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
Kelly Goto
Emotion Economy: Ethnography as Corporate Strategy
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Satyam Kantamneni
Do You Have an Experience Vision?
2023 • Enterprise Community
Vanessa Varin
Tools are moments. Capabilities compound.
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Conference
Nathan Curtis
Beyond the Toolkit: Spreading a System Across People & Products
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Peter Merholz
Design at Scale is People!
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Christopher Taylor Edwards
Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Alissa Briggs
How to Coach Enterprise Experimentation
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Greg Petroff
Design is the Differentiator: Bringing New Design Innovations to a Very Antiquated and Very Large Industry
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Jon Fukuda
Theme One Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Matt Duignan
Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Brigette Metzler
Scaling ResearchOps: Helping Researchers do Their Best Work
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Andrea Gallagher
The Problem Space
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Greg Petroff
Software as Material—A Redux
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Christian Rohrer
Research Operations at Scale
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Kate Towsey
ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt
2025 • Advancing Research Community

More Videos

Tutti Taygerly

"Failure is easy but recovery is really hard. Naming your feelings and sharing them is key to resilience."

Tutti Taygerly

Videconference: How to Work with Difficult People with Tutti Taygerly

June 25, 2020

Indra Klavins

"Multiple teams were supporting the same goals in different ways, and that led to meaningful cross-team conversations."

Indra Klavins

A Design Ops Girl in a Dev Ops World

October 23, 2019

Daniel J. Rosenberg

"You don’t want to game anybody here. This is persuasion by evidence, not by trickery."

Daniel J. Rosenberg

Designing with and for Artificial Intelligence

August 11, 2022

Caroline Vize

"Time constraints and budget limitations are the top obstacles to effective research today."

Caroline Vize

The State of UX: Five Lessons from 2021 to Accelerate Digital Experience in 2022

March 9, 2022

Paul Pangaro, PhD

"If you don't have shared language and values, you can't coordinate your actions or agree on what to do."

Paul Pangaro, PhD

Systems Disciplines: Table Stakes for 21st Century Organizations

June 6, 2023

Erin Weigel

"Most product teams stay on the bottom rungs of evidence, relying on opinions or observational data instead of randomized trials."

Erin Weigel

Get Your Whole Team Testing to Design for Impact

July 24, 2024

Josh Clark

"Typing prompts is not the UX of the future. Integration into the interactive context where you work is better."

Josh Clark Veronika Kindred

Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)

January 15, 2025

Jack Behar

"Component-driven prototyping means designing with coded UI components your development team already created."

Jack Behar

How to Build Prototypes that Behave like an End-Product

December 6, 2022

Louis Rosenfeld

"Peter kept saying, Lou, you should create a subscription service, but we only had two books then."

Louis Rosenfeld

GenAI for UXers: A Rosenbot Demo and Discussion

June 11, 2025