[thelist] Do women view web pages differently from men?

[H. G. Quinn]

LOL!  My 1st reaction to George's post was to think cynically, "Yeah, women use
their brain a bit, and guys just jump for the flash!" (npi, flashers, npi x2).
But there are men and there are men, so that wasn't fair.  A guy I'm doing work
for now is constantly asking me to make graphics bigger, and animate them; he
doesn't even notice most of the things on the pages I'm doing, but his wife see
everything.  Yet I also know plenty of guys who, when browsing a new page or
using a new app, ignore graphics altogether, and get stuck because they don't
"see" buttons.  But on the whole, I think there may be a difference.  I think
women are more cautious, less playful.  They will take in the whole screen
before they act, unless they've used the page or app before, so perhaps this
gives them more of an opportunity to see text links (it would be interesting to
measure response times, to see if there's a difference across the sexes).  I
think that many women believe they have more to lose by making mistakes, being
the ones whose salaries are discounted by at least 20% as compared with men,
etc. <grrrr>howl, scream, turn red, etc.</grrrr>, so perhaps they would tend to
tread more warily than men.  Re visual erotica, we tend to dismiss it when we
know a guy is into that stuff, but are confused or slightly shocked if a woman
is, so maybe societal pressure limits the production of high-quality erotica for
women (I don't know any women who like sleaze, so it would have to be quality
stuff), and with no good erotic stuff at hand, women turn to materials that are
marketed at them simply because the publications/books are sitting in profusion
at their bookstore or newsstand -- therefore woman love romance novels
(actually, I prefer mysteries and nonfiction ;-).

"Green, Janet" wrote:

> My gut instinct says, YES I think this could be an important factor. In
> "other walks of life" men are notoriously more image/graphic oriented. This
> is one big reason why erotica is so different for different sexes: men flock
> to the magazines for the photos (I think all that talk about "excellent
> articles" is smoke-and-mirrors), while women flock to escapist ("romance")
> novels. Now of course there are men who enjoy a good story, and women who
> appreciate a good visual - but generally speaking, I've heard over and over
> that men are visual, women are textual.  I'm sorry I don't have any real
> sources to back this up (except perhaps for the widely quoted "Men are from
> Mars, Women are From Venus" book??), it's just the sense I get from all the
> stuff I've read and heard over the last ten or so years.

Cheers,
--
Heather Quinn
hgquinn at attglobal.net
http://pws.prserv.net/windyhill
http://www.windyhilldesign.com