I just read a little blurb from a study that suggests women prefer Web sites designed by other women, and men prefer Web sites designed by other men. Fascinating!
Key Website Research Highlights Gender Bias
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“We started off by looking at the personal websites created by 60 university students, 30 male and 30 female, to discover whether there were any major design differences. We looked at factors such as language, visuals, and navigation – the differences were immediately apparent,” explained Gloria Moss. “We compared the sites on 23 factors and differences emerged on just over half of these. This is a massive number.”
Where visuals are concerned, males favour the use of straight lines (as opposed to rounded forms), few colours in the typeface and background, and formal typography. As for language, they favour the use of formal or expert language with few abbreviations and are more likely to promote themselves and their abilities heavily.
A selection of the University websites was then shown to a group of individuals of both sexes who had to rate their appeal on a scale. In almost every case women preferred those sites designed by women and men showed a preference for those created by men.
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