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."

Comments

Idiotic conclusion

[jeorgen]

To make a difference between men and women WRT 3D user interface design is completely idiotic. It is much smarter to make a difference between people with high spatial ability and low. You can measure it. It just takes a littler longer than to check the genitals.

I score very bad on spatial ability, and I am a man. My father does the same. Incidentally we're both computer consultants.

Wouldn't it be smarter to say that people with low spatial ability need bigger screens for the same performance? Why the gender thing? Battle of the sexes?

/jeorgen

Re:3D, not desktop

[videodriverguy]

Maybe currently, but Microsoft is known to be working on including 3D elements on the desktop.

So in the future it may be useful to allow for a gender related setting.

Don't know if it is true

[Anonymous Coward]

I am posting this anonymously because I don't really want everyone to know my medical history, but in 1999 I had a right temporal lobectomy (my brain's right temporal lobe removed) to try and cure me of epilepsy.

The right temporal lobe is the part of the brain that controls spatial ability, so after it was excised, I completely lost my ability to orient myself, and have huge problems with getting home from the bus stop and things like that. Nonetheless, it has not stopped me being able to navigate a computer desktop at all.

I am not sure why this is, but I would be interested to know if people like myself were included in this study at all.

There could be other factors at play here.

Re:Don't know if it is true

[itchyfidget]

Gosh, I hope the op worked for you (since it's kinda non-trivial) :-)

Navigating the computer desktop is a two-dimensional task, which does not require quite the same internalised map of the world as a three-dimensional task like finding your way home from the bus-stop. Experiments with rats and mazes (and rat-sized brain ops) show that the temporal lobe is critical for navigational success. In fact, other areas of your brain are also involved in spatial orientation, but spatially-orienting yourself to use your internalised map of the world cannot really be carried out without the temporal lobe. Saying that, you still have your left temporal lobe, so it is possible that some spatial-orientation functions will still be intact?

Re:3D, not desktop

[Surak]

I work as a CAD systems administrator, and it's true that when women see some of the wide screens that are available, they immediately want one. Guys tend to think they're cool, too, and they may want one, but women almost seem to demand them.

Of course the number of women as opposed to men who are in the automotive design and engineering fields is disproportionately low, and this may actually be one of the reasons. Interesting... :)

Re:3D, not desktop

[vondo]

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.

This is one of the things discussed in a book called "The First Sex." The thesis is that men and women are different, because of evolutionary pressures. The author also argues that the areas where women excel over men (e.g. social coordination, as mentioned in the Counter Strike example) are the very skills that are going to be most needed in the near future, so women will continue to play a larger and larger role in the work force.

An interesting read.

Spatial relations: An observable fact in Tetris ..

[adzoox]

Women's spatial abilities can honestly be measured in video games like Tetris as well. An ex girlfriend of mine could kick my butt in just about every video game but Tetris. While I considered myself a great player, she never understood the "stick down the left side theory" of Tetris. Even though I was in high school I understood that she had problems with spatial relations. (many jokes can be inferred I'm sure)

I noticed it when other girls would play too.

What's interesting about this observation and what I would like answered is this:

Why was the Gameboy version the easiest to me? Monochrome?

Why was the regular, original Nintendo the best version?

Why was the arcade version so hard?

Why is the computer version boring?

Why does it make a difference with how the pieces are colored or how they look?

I do agree with the find too. Girls see no "gadget, cool" factor in a small TV. I once took a Casio TV on a camping trip with the same girl so she could watch 90210. We ended up having to go out of our way and watch it on a "normal" TV.

I think the real answer here is that women like consistency and normalcy. I find they hate big screen TV's as much as they hate Casio handhelds. All they want is content! (Something that can also be inferred and suggested)

Re:3D, not desktop

[dasmegabyte]

Of course, the underlying problem with this thesis is the presumption that men hunted while women foraged. While this seems to make sense to us, seeing as we've been dealing with the male breadwinner stereotype for at least the past thousand years, the archeological record does not necessarily agree with it. While there is evidence that men hunted, there is no evidence that they did not assist in the foraging and domestic chores, and in fact fingerprints in pottery seem to indicate that both men and women shared in these.

Keep in mind that hunting was a difficult enterprise, physically strenuous and dangerous. You couldn't just nick off to Wal-mart and buy a 22 -- you had a sharpened stick and some obsidian flakes and that's about it. So it makes evolutionary sense that cultures that kept their women away from the hunt would prosper -- fewer dead or injured women that way. That doesn't mean that men did nothing else -- there's a lot of evidence that foraging was the primary source of food. Anybody who thinks women were just going to shut up and let the ment lounge around while they toiled hasn't been nagged to clean the garage.

Yeah, I think there's an evolutionary benefit to nagging.

My Intro to Archeology professor was a feminist (ostensibly because he had an open marriage and wanted to tag some college tail, not happening the guy was sleazy and still wore tight jeans from the 1970s) and loved to bring up the dichotomy between the classic "Man as Hunter/Scholar" and post modern "Woman as Gatherer/Nurturer" theories of human evolution, as well as what was supported by the meager evidence. In essence, it seemed to prove that neither sex "had it easy" and he went on to tie this into the historical record and a nice long lecture about how modern gender roles are thrusting women into the workplace without removing their previous roles in the home and how this is changing faster than men's roles and how men should clean the the house more, blah blah. I kinda slept through most of that.

My wife, however, took excellent notes, which she is referring to to this day.

might be a bias in the design and/or test?

[fermion]

Although most posters have either joked about or felt insulted by these finding, they may in fact be important and correct. The issue could be, as it is in many cases, that computer products are designed to meet the needs of the designer and not the full range of users. Those who have designed significant products will see the truth in this. We all have fallen to the trap of designing products that fit our use patterns at the expense of other people. We design products that play to our strengths, that minimize the effects of our weaknesses, which result in an overly specific product that is not fully usable by the general populous. This not only causes use problems with non-dominant groups, but also can cause systematic errors in the test itself.

As an example, let's look at the controversial SAT exam. This test has been, and may still be, written for, by, and of privately east coast educated white people. For example, when the ETS evaluats the suitability of questions, at least in the near past, the questions that make it onto the real test were those that upper class east-coast white people did best on. This not some because of some explicit prejudice, but merely because the conventional wisdom said upper class east coast white people, as a group, were better educated and smarted, and question that they did best with were in fact the best questions. The corollary is that minority off coast people were less educated, and if they did well on a question, it was obviously a bad question.

Which is to say that history is written by the victors, and critical usability and evaluation points are chosen by the managers and designers. In this case, the computer programs and usability tests may be biased to a male population. Perhaps the issue is not so much screen size, but rather the assumption that a certain pattern of use, or a certain problem solving method, is going to be primary for all users. This is an especially good possibility for 3D technology as it is not yet in wide use, and would be particularly susceptible to these aberrations.