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Designing for women in the 21st century

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Once there was a girl, and the girl liked pink very much. Everything she owned was pink. Pink and small, and that’s the way she liked it. But gradually the girl (we’ll call her Emily) grew into a sophisticated woman. Sure, she still liked pink every now and then, but only as part of a rich and vibrant world of colour. In the same way, though she still enjoyed clothes and shoes, she also enjoyed gaming and technology, areas traditionally dominated by men.

Sadly, the men (and it is always men) who made things for Emily suffered a collective failure of imagination and empathy. Making things small and pink (‘pink-it-and-shrink-it’) is what worked before: surely it will work again - and keep on working. So they made smaller razors and made them pink, smaller magazines and made them - you got it - pink. Even computers weren’t immune, as Dell launched Della: a small and pink version of its best-selling laptop, with a small, pink website to match.

But why? It’s as though marketeers and product designers considered Emily to be an afterthought. Part of a market to be pandered to once the serious design business is done. And yet the smallest amount of research would reveal that women are driving consumer trends: they make or influence 80% of shopping purchases, buy 65% of all new vehicles and spend billions of pounds on consumer electronics. And whilst we’re talking numbers: men occupy 97% of the Fortune 1000 CEO positions.

So broadly speaking, men are making things, and women are buying them.

And yet: 91% of women say marketeers don’t understand them.

A quick glance at advertising design shows why: clichés and subtle (sometimes not-so-subtle) sexism abound. Noting this, Holly Buchanan (for her piece on ‘Marketing to women online’) adapted the Bechdel test (for critiquing women’s roles in films): can you answer ‘yes’ to the following three questions. Do you feature a woman outside of the home? Do you feature a woman in a role other than ‘mother’? Do you show a woman doing an activity other than yoga?

And it’s funny because it’s true: Images of women doing yoga on a beach are the 21st century version of the housewife in the kitchen. Women today are pilots, engineers, athletes, artists, plumbers and presidents but if you were to believe most marketing messaging you’d be forgiven for thinking that women are either mothers or eye-candy or - oh! happy day - both!

Of course, it’s easy to mock marketeers who think that ‘pink’ is a strategy but what’s the answer? How should we design for Emily in the 21st century? Interestingly enough, there is a reasonable amount of research into what sort of design cues resonate with women, and they make for interesting reading.

Gloria Moss has two such studies to her name, and just the title of her second book - ‘Why Men Like Straight Lines and Women Like Polka Dots’ - is revealing. Moss conducted extensive research with groups of men and women in scenarios where they both consume and create design. From this she is able to extrapolate some remarkable insights. Women are more likely to be interested in detail than men. They prefer craft over tech. They want to know what something will do for them and how it will make their lives better in some way. They are more likely to seek human interaction in transactions.

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So far, so general. But there’s more: women don’t like modernism because it rejects everything identifiable with the feminine, such as decoration and display. Well really! Talk about subtle sexism! It seems to me as though Moss is falling foul of lazy generalisations in much the same way that marketeers do.

Indeed, studies such as these tend to lead us to the same murky subtle-sexism waters of ‘women like x so design accordingly’ as the pink-it-and-shrink-it brigade. Because, quite frankly, men and women can’t be reduced to two extreme opposites, and studies on gender response will only ever give generalisations.

What these studies can teach us is things to avoid, if common sense doesn’t already give us that: avoid gender targeting, don’t use pink as a strategy, never assume women don’t care about tech, don’t use patronising imagery and don’t imagine that women like to be shown pictures of youth: 21st century woman is more likely to be middle-aged than twentysomething.

So here’s a controversial thought: rather than try to anticipate what all women might want, how about we try to create good design that will appeal to both genders? The Della experience should, if nothing else, teach us that women neither need nor want a bespoke website. We could look instead to brands like Apple, which create female-friendly products (and sites and apps) and conclude that maybe good design simply appeals to men and women alike.

For example, when it comes to web design, Women respond to same general rules of usability that men do. So when we begin every design journey with the user, as we always have and always should, we could do far worse than remember that more likely than not the user is Emily, or someone very much like her, whose responses can’t be neatly categorised and generalised by gender, and who only sometimes likes things to be pink.

- By Guy Sexty, Head of Design at Partners Andrews Aldridge

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