[Sigia-l] It's all about sex

[Louise Hewitt]

>GLAM> In almost every case women preferred those sites designed by
>GLAM> women and men showed a preference for those created by men.
>
Boniface:
>The study looked at personal websites - a form of personal expression.
>Thus it is not surprising that male prefers male's personal expression
>and female prefers female's personal expression.

Ok, first let me confess that I haven't read the doc yet

I agree with Boniface, but think it needs expanding. Yes, if you ask
for an aesthetic assessment of preference, I'm sure the top comment
works.

If you are trying to 'speak' to a female audience, you could be making
a grave mistake in using this kind of approach. Women do not always
like to be targeted so overtly, and can often rebound in the opposite
direction.

Good case in point, a new poster campaign for 'bacardi breezers' has
sprung up on every bus stop in my town. These show big images of
glamour models with the bottle in their hand and a slogan declaring
their inane schizophrenia ("half of me loves going to the gym, half of
me's a big fat pig" style). I hate them, if I was reasonably
uninclined to drink their product before, I'm never going near it now,
and I have a healthy contempt for the parent company who sponsored the
insulting and damaging campaign. But they do all have nice teeth.

I'm not their audience, It's not a product (or service) I want. But if
it were, they would have had better luck just sticking a picture of
the bottle on a black background with some silver words (a la man).

We get back to understanding your audience, which I think is pretty
core to the whole IA shebang. We use bright colours for kids, round
corners for ladies, and flashing stuff for blokes is too simple.

I'm off to read the doc now :-) And I'm glad to hear that the data is
a bit complicated - users are a bit complicated too. I look forward to
some discussion on the details of each design preference soon.

Ta,

Lou.