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Women Need Larger Screens for Desktop Navigation?
Mac of Macistan writes "In a recent
article in the New Scientist, Microsoft's R&D claims that women have a harder time navigating the desktop because their spatial abilities are roughly 20% lower than men's abilities. Maybe Linux UI people can get a jump on MS by making KDE/Gnome more accessible to more females."
This is not about 2D desktop navigation, but about orientation in a 3D environemnt such as a computer game or a 3d design program. It appears be that the restricted field of vision with a small screen makes it hard for women to build a mental map of the enviroment and locate themselves within it.
The arcticle speculates that this may be due to evolutionary reasons; men are on average better at spatial-awareness for navigation when hunting, while women wouldn't have needed such skills looking after the home camp.
Surprise! woman here who uses linux and other and reads /. regularly - oooooo shocking.
I usually hate this type of article and it is mostly **** but I must say from personal experience that when I play a 3D game, say UT2K3 or other, on my laptop with 14" screen I get major motion sickness. When I play on 17" or higher I don't. Not sure if that is a specific side effect from their study, as it isn't very clear from the article.
Though this does not mean it's specifically a "woman" thing, it seems quite weird. I tend to think the reasons we women find it hard to get our "bearings" is that we're thinking of a million things at once, while the male, well, you can fill that in...
But since this is a M$ study, they realize that women, in general, make the practical purchase decisions for the household, and it would be nice to get PC vendors to sell the bigger monitors for their bloated OS, instead of making a better UI, wouldn't it?
To summarize: The article does not state if the larger display helped men or not, but with the larger display, men and women tested equally.
http://psych.unn.ac.uk/users/nick/hormoneslec06.ht m
http://www.neoteny.org/a/lateralization3.html
There is no reason to truly debate the differences between the sexes. When sex is a group variable then differences in spatial reasoning consistently emerge. That said, the two groups necessarily overlap because of native skill and the interaction with other cognitive processes.
A simple minded explanation suggests that by and large males abstract a geometric representation of their environment to create a map, while females make greater use of landmark cues - markers in the environment - to construct a mental map. Again, the use of strategy is not exclusive to one group. What you can infer from the above is that if sufficient landmark cues are present then the sexes should be equivalent in performance. The following two papers quickly covers those issues,
Gron G., Wunderlich, A. P., Spitzer, M., Tomczak, R., & Riepe, M. W. (2000). Brain activation during human navigation: gender-different neural networks as substrate of performance. Nature. 4, 404-408.
Sandstrom, N.J., Kaufman, J., & Huettel, S. A. (1998) Males and females use different distal cues in a virtual environment navigation task. Cognitive Brain Research,6, 351-360.
In my own research there is every indication that the differences in spatial reasoning holds. What's not clear is whether there is a significant relationship with skill at navigating a specific interface - in this case a complex website using the links. In a preliminary study with 47 participants it's not surprising that cognitive skills - those things associated with intelligence - is a stronger predictor of behaviour.
Now, the Microsoft study appears to be aimed at improving actual navigation in 3D environments. If the environment does not include landmark cues then perhaps bigger screens will eliminate the differences. Presumably performance asymptotes for both groups at a specific size. So, doesn't it really depend on the cues present in the virtual environment?
KNS