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Women Need Larger Screens for Desktop Navigation?

Posted by michael on from the francis'-2000"-LCD dept.

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."

5 of 607 comments (clear)

  1. 3D, not desktop by Brown · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:3D, not desktop by Aetrix · · Score: 3, Informative
      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.

      Sorry, Folks. That's bullshit. I"m calling it. It's what's called "Lamarckian evolution" and sadly, it goes on every day. Lamark believed that somatype mutations and changes are hereditary. For example, an adult has an arm removed, and when he/she reproduces the children should have only one arm. We realize THAT's bullshit, but when we're confronted with "evolutionary learning" the lines become blurred.

      No. It's not possible for some idea of "spatial mapping" to be heritable. Sorry. "Spatial mapping" can be taught. Trying to provide some biological/evolutionary notion to explain why women need wider screens is crap. Yeah, maybe women need wider screens, but maybe it's for some compeletly different reason...

      Sorry this hunter-gatherer ideaology spounted by some punk-ass M$ PR Rep is garbage and a stupid ploy to make him sound like this isn't sexist research.
      --

      "One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
  2. Re:Orientation by jjphtm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

  3. More display helps women more than men by Rommel · · Score: 5, Informative
    The article was very clear on this:

    They found that women were just as good as men at virtual navigation when they had a large computer display. "The gender difference simply disappeared," says Czerwinski.

    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.
  4. It has been studied.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative
    There have been a large number of studies on this and they seem to indicate sex hormones play a large role. Some examples:

    http://psych.unn.ac.uk/users/nick/hormoneslec06.ht m
    http://www.neoteny.org/a/lateralization3.html