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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."

19 of 607 comments (clear)

  1. Then why do they.... by dcw3 · · Score: 5, Funny

    keep telling me that size doesn't matter!?!

    --
    Just another day in Paradise
    1. Re:Then why do they.... by jpkunst · · Score: 5, Funny

      I suppose you haven't been paying attention to your e-mail lately?

      JP

    2. Re:Then why do they.... by jwilson · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I want to reply to this comment because I want to have my comment as close to the top as possible.

      Slashdot SERIOUSLY messed this article summary up. Women do NOT have "problems nagivating the desktop". According to this article, women have less spacial cognizance when it comes to 3D environments such as FPS, MMORPG or games like Myst. 3D virtual worlds, NOT THE DESKTOP.

      What I DON'T want to see is a bunch of jerks spouting "women have a harder time navigating the desktop" than men, because Slashdot farked up their summary of the article. I mean, SERIOUSLY FSCKED it up. Desktop = 2D. Get it straight, boys... A lot of your readers only read the summary snippets and don't bother with the articles.

      For this kind of readership, you may just have spawned a whole new inaccurate generalization about women.

      Thanks, we needed this new kind of misinformation.

      I have no problem with the article, but I have a BIG problem with the summary snippet.

      Get it right.

  2. What a girl wants... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Maybe Linux UI people can get a jump on MS by making KDE/Gnome more accessible to more females."

    Uh... yea. Because Linux and women go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

  3. 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 shine-shine · · Score: 5, Funny

      Finally, I'll now have a scientific explanation why 'some poeple' shouldn't be allowed to drive.

      Humor. Don't shoot.

    2. Re:3D, not desktop by vondo · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

    3. Re:3D, not desktop by dasmegabyte · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
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  4. Orientation by Whigh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, that would explain why most men don't stop and ask for directions, eh?

    Wider screens and more realistic 3D animations, they say, will boost women's spatial orientation and 3D map-reading skills to match those of their male counterparts.
    Heck, this'll boost anyone's spatial orientation.

    Women, they found, find it easier to get their bearings when this animation is smooth and realistic, rather than jerky.
    Just about everyone does.

    Is it possible that with more intensive training, this spatial perception inequality might be eliminated?
    (Hint: Use this as an excuse to get more UT2K3 playing in!!!)

    1. Re:Orientation by Galvatron · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Yeah, I noticed that they didn't say if men experienced similar boosts in performance if they were given larger screens and smoother animations too. It seems to me that it's just as likely that the men were rushing, while the women were taking a more cautious and careful approach. Did they compare accuracy rates? 20% difference in cognitive performance seems pretty high, I'm not sure I buy it.

      Also, why divide people based on gender? I'm sure SOME of the men had poor spacial oriention, and SOME of the women must have been good at the task. Why not simply divide people into "fast" and "slow" groups based on performance in the initial set of tests? They don't seem to have done any testing to determine if solutions which seem to work for average women also work for under-performing men.

      --
      "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
  5. Gender Equality by LordChaos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... This one will really make the sh*t hit the fan in terms of gender equality. To make a blanket statement about the abilities of either gender is bound to form harsh criticism from many fronts.

    I mean perhaps the "spatial ability" of the different genders is tuned to a different form of interface. Perhaps the symptom we should be addressing is that current user interfaces are designed for use from the male aspect, and therefore the generic woman (whatever that is) functions in such an environment.

    In my psychology days we looked at many examples of studies that were swayed in a particular direction to to flaws in the testing procedures.

    Not to say that this article in new scientist really backs up its claims - statements such as it seems .. that women possess lower spatial abilities, and it tends

    But that's aside from the point - I can accept that men and women interact with a user interface in differing ways. But to suggest that taking a "male" user interface, and making it bigger - to adapt it more to the "generic woman" (see above) - I find ludicrous, and a vast underestimation of the task at hand.

    I'm just stirring, but I think it's really something to think about in the next decade as we move away from windowing environments to whatever is next - be it 3D interfaces on a 2D display, virtual immersion - or whatever... We need to think about things more than "lets make it bigger".

  6. Idiotic conclusion by jeorgen · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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

  7. Re:Sounds like... by itchyfidget · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...sexist scientific research to me. The usual men are better than women crap.

    I work in this field of psychology and believe it or not, this is one of the few areas of human performance where genuine sex differences are observed - repeatedly and reliably.

    You can see this principally in the visuo-spatial section of IQ tests. Some authors (e.g. Kimura) argue that this is because IQ tests tap a particular aspect of visuo-spatial awareness and that men are naturally superior in this regard, but that women excel in other visuo-spatial tests which tap different facets of the skill.

    If you go back forty years, IQ tests used to "show" that ethnic minorities were less clever - now it is known that those early tests were highly culturally-specific ("If you give the maid twenty items of clothing to press but she already has another thirty-two from your Ma and Pa, what time can you arrive at your tennis lesson?") - I think in a couple of decades we'll be seeing IQ tests that are a whole lot less gender-biased.

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  8. News Flash by dsanfte · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Heh. News flash, the genders aren't equal. One of them can bear children, the other can't. Other differences exist.

    Instead of trying to say both genders are equal, why not try this radical approach: accept that one gender has advantages over the other in some areas, and vice versa in others, and use those differences for the greater good!

    --
    occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
    1. Re:News Flash by Galvatron · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Instead of trying to say both genders are equal, why not try this radical approach: accept that one gender has advantages over the other in some areas, and vice versa in others, and use those differences for the greater good!

      How about an even more radical approach: accept that not all members of a given group are the same, and instead of assigning gender roles, encourage people to do whatever they're good at! If that means that there are more men doing tasks that involve spatial orientation, fine, wonderful. But it's absurd to say that women shouldn't do those tasks because they're not as good at them. People are individuals, not averages. Even your example of bearing children is not universal: some women can't give birth. So cut this evolutionary psychology crap and judge people for who they are, not based how a sample group of the same gender performed in a laboratory setting.

      --
      "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
    2. Re:News Flash by titzandkunt · · Score: 5, Funny


      "Heh. News flash, the genders aren't equal. One of them can bear children..."

      ...And the other one can walk past a shoe shop

      T&K.

      --
      Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable...
  9. Don't know if it is true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  10. 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.
  11. Cart before the horse by t0ny · · Score: 5, Funny
    Maybe Linux UI people can get a jump on MS by making KDE/Gnome more accessible to more females."

    Maybe they should focus on making it accessible to regular people, and THEN focus on a sub-demographic.

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