[Sigia-l] Usability preferences by gender

[Lyle_Kantrovich at cargill.com]

Of course, one of the things that makes the usability field interesting 
(IMHO) is that human behavior changes.  Ziya makes a good point - 
computers are much more ubiquitous today than 10 years ago.  Of course 
that doesn't mean that men and women are suddenly the same in how they 
use them.  It just begs the question "what's changed?"

A study done in the 1950's might have found that US boys played with 
different toys than US girls.  50+ years later the toys may have 
changed, the ways they play may have changed, but you'd still find major 
differences between the genders.

While technology and access to it might have changed in 10 or 15 years, 
culture and physiological differences change much slower.  So unless we 
know what the cause of the differences in behavior are, we can't assume 
that the differences have vanished.  

Like I said earlier - researching *your* users is the best way to 
understand your users.  Reading 15 year old research may not provide as 
much valid insight - but you might be able to do it a lot faster.  :-)

Lyle

-----Original Message-----
From: listera at rcn.com [mailto:listera at rcn.com]
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 4:34 PM
To: Sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Usability preferences by gender


"Lyle_Kantrovich at cargill.com" wrote:

> ...girls and boys think about computers differently [Hall and Cooper 
1991;

There have been huge changes in the past 15 years wrt
computer/games/Internet access/usage/expectations among girls and boys. 
So I
wouldn't rely on anything from the past century on that subject.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba