Wendy Hall is not intimidated by technology — she is a professor of computer science at Southampton University and the president of the British Computer Society. So why does she still have a paper diary instead of a supposedly wonderful gizmo, such as a handheld computer? Because “the pain isn’t worth the gain”.
Hall is not the only one. There is growing female frustration with technology designed by men, for men. Women are interested neither in how many features a gadget has, nor the reasons why the latest model is more sophisticated than the last. They want technology that serves a purpose, fits into their everyday lives and does not require hours of flicking through manuals.
“It takes a long time to set them (handheld computers) up and to get everything working, and I can never be bothered,” Hall said. “I’m very busy and my diary is full 12 hours a day. Men might see it as a challenge, but I don’t want to spend what spare time I have making gadgets work. I don’t buy them when the latest thing comes out — I buy them when they are simple to operate and make my life easier.”
To explain such attitudes, women’s technology habits are being placed under the microscope. Working in collaboration with the University of Surrey’s Digital World Research Centre, Laurel Swan is researching how mothers use technology — if, indeed, they do at all. “So far, I’ve found that anything that requires a lot of effort to set up is binned immediately,” she said, “or it just doesn’t happen. There’s not enough time in the day.”
Men and women approach technology differently because they want different things. “Females want a product to do the job and they see it as a means to an end,” said Deana McDonagh, a reader in user- centred industrial design at the University of Loughborough, who has a particular interest in gender and design. “There may be 130 programs on a washing machine, but we’ve found that only three are ever used.”
Men, on the other hand, tend to be extremely proud of how complex things are. “If you show your mobile phone to people in the pub, men will grab it and spend hours looking at every feature,” said Perdita Patterson, who edited What Mobile magazine for five years. “Women will say: ‘That’s interesting. Can we talk about something else?’”
New technology was not supposed to be like this. “There used to be a theory about how the web was a levelling experience: you could release yourself from your gender and be whoever you wanted to be,” said Laura Jordan, a designer at the web consultancy Lateral in London. “I don’t think any tool can be removed from the society it is in.” The tech industry is overwhelmingly dominated by men. On Hall’s course in Southampton, only one in 20 of the students are women. “We attract a lot of geeks — young men who can’t communicate with people, but can communicate with their computers,” she said.
As a result, products reflect the people who are behind them. “Traditionally, design culture has been very male and very technology driven,” admitted Tim Parsey, head of design for Motorola in Chicago. “It’s been about, ‘Hey, we did it with 80 features last time. Let’s put 130 in next.’”
Programming was traditionally a man’s job. “Men didn’t want to know about interface design,” said Swan, who, 10 years ago, worked for a small technology firm in America and was the only woman in the company. “They wanted to write code. Writing code was really cool. Thinking about the worker who would use it was incredibly boring. They called it ‘soft’. It made them feel ill.”
The consequences are still with us. Take Microsoft’s Word, which is “overwrought” and “overcomplex”, according to Jane Austin, one of three women who run a digital design company called Recollective in London. “It has huge amounts of extra stuff, as though someone thought, I can do this, so I’m going to do it, instead of thinking, why should I do this?”
Microsoft’s presentation software, PowerPoint, suffers similar faults. “You can put fake Post-it notes on documents, and write messages on them as if they were real, which I love,” Austin said. “But then there is additional functionality that allows you to turn them upside down, reverse them, or give them a shadow. Why would anybody want to do these things to a fake Post-it note?”
Efforts are being made to bridge the gender gap. Men, who are better at spatial awareness, perform up to 20% better in 3-D virtual-reality environments, and traditionally women have been given special training to catch up. Recently, however, researchers have discovered that adjusting the tech- nology was just as effective. They found that if computer screens are made wider, women perform as well as men.
When it comes to consumer electronics, companies such as Motorola say they have got the message. About time, too. The company’s mobile phones (including my Timeport, which even Motorola calls “that old brick”) could not be less intuitive if the instructions were written in Sanskrit.
“Women have a greater sensitivity to what a product is going to do for them, in contrast to the male angle, which is all about technological bells and whistles,” Parsey said. Yet some of his jargon makes you wonder whether lessons are being learnt. He talks about how the designers “focus on experience zones”, and how they see mothers as being “in the moto-life space”, “moto-life” being the experience of looking after your life, community and relationships.
The handheld computer maker Palm, in San Jose, California, also claims to be conscious of female consumers. It has every reason to be — by 2008 almost half of the workforce will be female. So when the company launched its Zire handheld last October, it took women’s criticisms on board and created a simpler product with only a few buttons and a rechargeable battery. It also comes with a one-sheet “read me first” document to supplement the manual. “Within a month, you could use it as well as anyone who has been using it for a year,” said Rich Gioscia, Palm’s director of design management.
A month? Try telling a mother with three children under five that it will take her a month to familiarise herself with a new piece of kit. The industry might be heading in the right direction, but it has quite a way to go yet.
What do women want? They want technology that solves problems, that has been thought through with real people and the real world in mind, that is so intuitive you do not need the manual, and — as we are being really fussy — is stylish enough to be desirable, but robust enough to survive an encounter with baby formula. Is this too much to ask? Not necessarily. “You don’t need a manual for your electric kettle,” Motorola’s Parsey said. “Why would you think a mobile phone is more complicated?” If he can deliver that, women will beat a path to his door.
