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

Andrew Forsberg andrew at thepander.co.nz
Fri Apr 6 09:57:41 CDT 2001


>A further question. If everyone on this list asks say 5 or 6 people, 
>assuming this list has about 1000 users, does that constitute a 
>proper survey, if the results are tabulated? (I actually am curious 
>about this, not being snide.)

Perhaps this is a question to put against existing sociological and / 
or linguistic research rather than web usability tests? If I'm write 
the main point is: in a couple of very limited tests men tended to 
read images, women to read text.

I don't know of any research into this area, but I would guess that a 
much larger variation between text reading and image reading would 
appear between cultures and social groups, than between the sexes. 
For example, I would not be surprised if, say, Russian people -- who 
(shoot me down if I'm way off base here) have a long cultural and 
religious history of using icons -- to more often tend to read 
images. While, perhaps, academics of the humanities would tend to 
read text.

Not that I have any evidence whatsoever to back this up, I'd just 
like to add cultural and social groups to the list Joe offered 
earlier:

At 12:53 PM -0700 5/4/01, Joe Crawford wrote:
>So this is a function of literacy, too; I think. I think that
>arbitrarily choosing sex and then using men vs. women is not rational
>enough, I'd factor in -- age, years browsing web, level of education,
>maybe even how well they *see*.

- Andrew
-- 
Andrew Forsberg
überNET





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