Is your website from Venus or Mars?
The old maxim that ‘men are from Mars and women from Venus’ has been explored in relation to the build of websites before i.e. How Men and Women View Images Differently but it occurred to me the other week to conduct my own highly scientific experiment to see if I could gain an insight into the difference between the sexes that I might find useful when building and refining a website.
The experiment
I was driving my family to visit a relative we only see occasionally. As I drove my wife Josie would be providing the much-needed directions, and I had printed out two different types of directions.
- a series of maps printed from the web showing both the whole journey in a single high-level map and a number of more detailed maps showing the route.
- a set of specific instructions describing the names of the roads, the distances required and the turnings need i.e. ‘after a 100 metres turn third left at the mini-roundabout.
Which would you have chosen to use?
I’d have chosen the first type of directions. The series of maps allowing me to understand which direction I needed to travel in and giving me a spatial grasp of the relationship between where I was coming from and where I was going to.
Josie chose the second type of directions, the series of instructions.*
Scientific rigor?
Now to ensure the scientific rigor and validity of this experiment I’ve since asked a number of my close friends, both male and female which, if only allowed to chose one type of directions, they would be most likely to select. With just one exception all the men plumbed for the maps and all the women the directions.
Perhaps these results are not that surprising as it has long been known that there are subtle differences between way the sexes process language, information, emotion and cognition etc. But it got me wondering when websites are being designed how often are these differences taken into account?
One for the blokes?
Should we provide graphical maps on websites for those who prefer to understand the world spatially? There is often great emphasis placed on the simplicity and ease of navigation but do we provide a sufficient overview of the entire site to allow that navigation to be contextualised?
One of the gals?
And for those that prefer to follow a series of directions, how often do you see a set of instructions available for download on how to buy something on a website?
If they were available on a website would you use a graphical map or a set of instructions?
* Just for the record we arrived at our destination in super fast time and with not a single mistake
