Hasta La Ideas

Last week, we posted that we were a little suspicious about the definition of “design” used in a study by the Journal of Consumer Research. Now we return to our skepticism, this time about a new piece of research to be published this month in the journal Behavior & Information Technology, wherein the central finding is that men prefer websites designed by men and, as follows, women like those designed by women more. Although we think that’s probably old hat, understanding that there are differences between the sexes and what appeals to them, outside of topic or maybe Geocities pages (e.g. bunnies and unicorns vs. monster trucks and laser shows), we can’t really wrap our brains around how genders would view the web differently, purely on a design level. The look and feel of the internet seems fairly collective, built from teams of both genders working together or everyone, regardless of sex, improving upon earlier ideas. But, again, we haven’t read the study yet, so we can’t pass judgment (or at least not go overboard with it). If we can get our hands on a copy, we’d be interested to see what it says. If anything, it’ll be beneficial for our stand-up comedy (“Men are all ‘I like blue websites that rock!’ and women are all ‘I like pink websites that have flowers!'”).

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