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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."

2 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.

  2. 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.