Celebrating 50 years of “femineering”
Published by Kyso Kisaen June 12th, 2007 in Brilliant Ideas, For the ladies, Technology
Ethel says women’s traditional role as family accountant/killjoy prevents her from spending $1000 on a camera more suitable for a photography major, especially if it’s just going to piss her off, which is why she’s not getting an SLR until you invite her to a focus group
Others already
jumped all over (and rightfully so!) this New York Times article that gapes in open-mouthed wonder at the interesting new trend! That one where companies realize that women! Control! Like a bunch of money! And make purchases! And you can sell them more shit! Just by giving them what they want! Zounds! Who knew? Just who fucking knew?
Eight months ago, Ms. Duarte, the 44-year-old chief executive of Duarte Design, bought an Apple MacBook. Soon she discovered just how useful her digital camera became when it conversed with her Mac’s iPhoto software, spilling her pictures on to the laptop’s screen with a single touch. A short time later, she said, she was making homemade DVDs with slideshows and videos, and beginning to notice that various manufacturers “make really cute bags now to carry around your laptop.”
This mysterious behavior is in marked contrast to that of men, who long ago grew resigned to the fact that they’d have to make DVDs and slideshows of pictures using FinalCutPro. I remember back when my roommate wanted to turn his precious memories into a slideshow – it took him hours just to learn when to cut and when to fade. But me, I was all “F-that! I’m waiting for someone to make a software suite that will come pre-installed with my computer and allow me to do those things that I never once have ever needed to do before. Then I will focus on accessorizing.”
Although I do like that I can now have a laptop bag that doesn’t scream “I CONTAIN A LAPTOP! GRAB ME AND RUN!” if it really took the influence of the mysterious woman before manufacturers saw the benefit of that, then they should really consider promoting more women. Then they can have insights like “maybe this shouldn’t be needlessly complicated or quite that hideous” right at the beginning of the design process, and we don’t have to waste valuable time every decade marveling over that special touch that women bring to a product, if only they’re asked.
So OK, what’s the take home lesson here? Women buy shit, then they buy more shit. Just like guys, they prefer to buy shit they like. Maybe someone should exploit this.
Ms. Duarte represents a growing number of women who are embracing consumer electronics just as the technologies are reaching out to embrace them. Behind this quiet revolution are engineers and designers who are bringing a more feminine sensibility to products historically shaped by masculine tastes, habits and requirements.
Yawn. Same old, same old. Sometimes I think industries do this on purpose. They make a toy by boys for boys and eventually, when the boys start playing somewhere else, it’s marketing’s cue to look around and find a ‘new’ market. And golly gee, what have we here! Women! Why shucks, where they here the whole time just ignoring our product because it never met their needs? Well we’ll just change that right now and doesn’t that just save this quarter’s revenue report! Despite the fact that women make an ungodly majority of purchase decisions, we’re like the junior varsity consumer team every damn time, and then we’re expected to clap our hands in delight and swoon when finally after eighteen-katrillion generations someone finally releases a version we’re willing to spend all that hard-budgeted money on.
And guess what, gals! They’re even starting to drop that pandering pink product nonsense! Isn’t that so modern! Don’t you want to give the executives at Nikon a big sloppy kiss for making the be-vaginaed SLR camera black and not shocking pink?
Only a few years ago, feminizing a consumer electronic product meant little more than creating a pink or pastel version of the same black or silvery item coveted by men. And, some retailers note, that kind of marketing still goes on. But feminizing technology is more about a product’s fundamentals, often expressed in its ease of use.
It turns out that women, unlike men, want nutty things like having their new TVs fit in the same nice furniture their old TVs sat in. Crazy bitches.
So don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of sexism in this article. But we’re so distracted by the offensive presentation (”Those wacky alien females, with their wacky alien needs!”) that it’s easy to lose sight of the important bit: these ideas are actually good. Like some of them are really, really good:
Shoppers see it throughout electronics store from the rising popularity of digital picture frames to flat-panel televisions that are designed to fit into the cabinets and armoires that once housed smaller-screened traditional televisions by moving the TV speakers from the sides to the top or bottom of the TV.
… Some of the latest cellphones made by LG Electronics have the cameras’ automatic focus calibrated to arms’ length. The company observed that young women are fond of taking pictures of themselves with a friend.
… Television makers have responded to more feminine considerations in several ways. Westinghouse Digital Electronics has recently released flat-panel liquid-crystal-display televisions — at the modest screen sizes of 32 and 40 inches that are more appealing to women — with built-in front-loading DVD players. Those are even more appealing to women, said Rey Roque, the company’s vice president for marketing, because the room will not be cluttered with a black box to view DVDs, or another set of unsightly wires.
I’ve had the “This TV is too large for this room” argument several times (once with coworkers). My ex’s mom once got a new flat-screen TV when the ex had a killer employee discount at an electronics store. The thing took over the fucking room in a way that no one piece of furniture has any right to do. And you couldn’t watch it in the daytime because it was clearly designed with the idea that it would be in a windowless home theatre room, an altar to television. Any ambient light washed it out completely and the glare was awful; but if it was pitch black outside and you figured out which of the five settings to use, the picture was awesome. Clearly a product designed with the average user in mind. And since I can’t use the spaghetti of wires and electronic goods in my family room to hint about how enormous my wang is, I’d like all the wires to be hidden somewhere where I don’t have to think about them and they won’t get in the way of my semi-annual vacuuming.
So where does this leave us: well, apparently men are impulsive, money-burning goobers too invested in being early-adopters to demand products that actually serve them instead of demanding that they relearn or reorganize everything every time they purchase something. Women, on the other hand, are mysterious, ineffable fairies whose macabre insistence that their new shit go with their old shit as easily as possible brings peace and joy to products everywhere, but it only works if the boys have had plenty of time to beat their heads against the wall on the first few versions. Angels of the fucking house, yo. Maybe if we were allowed in the public sphere we could shake our fairy dust on the blueprints and save everyone some time.
Or, if you’re the New York Times, men (even –no, especially - the irrational ones) are the standard, women are the deviation. That’s what makes this news.
So you’re making a new product. You’ve actually located some women in the wild and queried them on their wants and needs. They shock you with their queer user requirements:
“For her, she wants it to be instantly understandable.” said Mandy Iswarienko, adding, “Men on the other hand want their possessions to flatter their over-inflated sense of competence even when it squeezes valuable time out of their day. That’s why the men’s battery charger is actually a Sony Walkman with the rewind button taken out, and the manual actually goes with a rice cooker available only in Korea. Then we put a secret compartment in the women’s charger, so she still has batteries after her husband takes the decoys. After all, the very definition of male privilege is that everyone does what they can to keep up your charade. Although it’s just recently we’ve learned to charge men more for the kabuki performance they demand.”
OK, I made part of that quote up.
Easy to use, not ass-ugly,fails to be so difficult to use that I eventually give up and toss it in the corner while trying not to think about how much money it cost, fits well with what I already own. What happens when you give the ladies what they want? The bitches go out of control!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My God! Women are purchasing like half of all digital cameras! As if they’re half the population or something! Shocking! Fantastic! Newsworthy!
“OK, I made part of that quote up.”
For a minute, I thought, “This Mandy Iswarienko is pretty damned funny!” Then I realized it was all you. As usual.
“if it really took the influence of the mysterious woman before manufacturers saw the benefit of that, then they should really consider promoting more women. Then they can have insights like “maybe this shouldn’t be needlessly complicated or quite that hideous” right at the beginning of the design process, and we don’t have to waste valuable time every decade marveling over that special touch that women bring to a product, if only they’re asked.”
I once heard someone say that more women should get into the field of software because once that happens, computers will be simpler to use. I can’t help but get the same feel of that argument from your paragraph above. Maybe I misunderstood. But I think what is happening is companies are learning the good sense not to let engineers design user interfaces unless they are specialised in that field. Human-computer interaction is difficult and complex and a lot of things have gone wrong from bad user interface designs and absolutely ridiculous mistakes (like a pilot reading altitude in feet instead of km). I don’t think this is about women making electronics simpler for woman, it’s about making electronics simple for anybody outside of the lab it was developed in. And the oversized tvs, again not just men vs. women, but the “bigger is always better” culture.
I don’t think this is about women making electronics simpler for woman, it’s about making electronics simple for anybody outside of the lab it was developed in.
That’s exactly it, and if you click on the one link I referenced where other people discuss the article, that guy says exactly that: dumbing stuff down for “women” is actually dumbing it down for “everyone who isn’t an early-adopting techophile.” Which is what makes the article so damn offensive: there was no reason to write about lighter, easier to use sophisticated cameras and normal-sized HDTVs as though these things are ‘feminine.’ It’s equally offensive to imply that men love to spend scads of money on poorly designed, unweildy products just because they’re all techie and cool.
But it’s true that engineers and software developers are predominately men, and often a specific type of man at that, and caring about the customer is a skill that women are better socialized to do regardless of their level of technical training, so it seems like actually giving a crap about the end user is gendered as feminine. This is of course crap, because at least half of your technically incompetent but wealthy end users will be busy men who will value ease of use and compatibility just as much as busy women.
So I guess my point is that chalking up this concern for ease and convenience to magic ovary rays is lazy journalism, and a very tired marketing campaign that has appeared many times in the past.
Also, this article is a big ol’ serving of the problem that was discussed in a 1992 book called “The Mismeasure of Woman,” about how women’s needs and experiences are considered to deviate from the standard, which is masculine. However, the masculine standard against which women are judged is always very narrow (too narrow to include all men) and changes according to the bias of the judge. In this case, “men” are a monolithic group of buyers who have always accepted the status quo that luxury electronic devices are naturally complicated, bulky things that should require a decent amount of technical knowledge to use. This flatters those men who think that being able to hook up a home theatre system is a sign of their technical mastery and intelligence.
The ‘feminine’ response is, hey, I spent $2,000 on this computer, it better just come out of the box and freaking work, or I’m not paying $4,000 for a television that doesn’t even fit in my living room. This is painted as something a little unreasonable, but understandable since women are a bit stupid, and the fact that companies have started to take this attitude under consideration is painted as a heroic (and novel) effort on the part of the manufacturer to cater to these neurotic demands.
If you think about it, the response that has been assigned “feminine” is actually the more reasonable one: these are luxury goods being discussed, and you wouldn’t call a male executive a pussy for demanding that he get his money’s worth out of a product or service. And a man who spent $2,000 on a computer wouldn’t think twice about demanding it meet his expectations. However, since the ‘male’ standard of technology was defined by engineers and geeks, who don’t mind if stuff is complicated or if wires are everywhere, then it becomes imperative to the article’s premise to ignore the fact that the ‘reasonable’ masculine standard really doesn’t make any sense for the majority of consumers. And since that’s the case, then any move away from the standard must be something foriegn brought in by women, because the men are all ready all in agreement, right?
“You’ve actually located some women in the wild and queried them on their wants and needs.”
So what if they tell you what they want. You can’t trust what they say anyway. We all know when a woman says “no” she really means yes. So you make your product in pink and then she complains that you’re condescending and stereotyping.
It just goes to show you: Bitchez Is Crazzeee!…
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Most women I know are extremely practical. Either something is helpful and easy to use or it’s a problem (and no, dumbing things down is not the answer either…). I think most manufacturers would be far better off having women design and test their stuff first, rather than using men first and leaving women as an afterthought.
My experience has been that a lot of men are rather dense when it come to usability issues…
I blame the patriarchy.
“I blame the patriarchy.”
Does Twisty get a cut when anybody uses that phrase?…
What’s a “dor”? Did somebody copyright “door” back in the day?
Yesterday, I couldn’t get my monitor stand to work. Not the computer, not the monitor, no, the stand. To adjust the height you either had to push or twist it in some non-intuitive way (I tried every way I could think of) or you had to have stronger hands than me. Eventually I gave up, said bad words, put the monitor on a box and emailed IT support.
I’m glad I can blame the patriarchy, ‘cos I was feeling like a bit of a thicky, I can tell you.
Ha! I’ve had this discussion with my guy friends about open source crap. They think open source software and operating systems are going to be the wave of the future, but I think that is stupid. Open source is designed by geeks for geeks and that is the reason it will never fly with the public. I don’t want to have to have a degree in computer science to use my computer. A lot of computer scientists think this is an entirely unreasonable thing to want.