Stenstrom, E., Stenstrom, P., Saad, G, & Cheikhrouhou, S. (2008). Online hunting and gathering: an evolutionary perspective on sex differences in website preferences and navigation. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 51(2), 155-168.
Annotation by Harrison Ownbey
This article examines the different cognitive systems men and women use to locate information. It uses a Darwinian perspective to explain how each sex navigates space. It hypothesizes that each sex applies their evolutionary psychology to digital and online spaces as well, then it tested that hypothesis with a mock website.
Darwinian models for psychology assume that men primarily hunted while women primarily gathered, and each sex evolved distinct navigational habits for managing their tasks. Males tracked their prey across long distances and then had to find the most direct route home, whereas females collected various foods close to home. Thus, males navigate more using their “internal compass” whereas women navigate using landmarks. The authors use the hunter/gatherer paradigm to explain more phenomena, such as why females have superior object location recall, why males talk less (remaining silent during the hunt), why females perceive color more accurately (avoiding poison plants), and why males have better 3-D object rotation (throwing spears).
The results of their study show that males prefer “deeper” websites (websites with more sublevels). Results are inconclusive about what females prefer. “Wide” websites (websites with all data laid out at once) delayed both male and female task completion time.
I’m skeptical about many aspects of this article, but I’m particularly unsure that online navigation parallels physical navigation.
Harrison,
ReplyDeleteThis looks like a really interesting article. I've always been fascinated with Darwinian ideas, and it seems this article has some really practical application to the field of technical communication studies. Understanding the supposed "natural" differences between men and women's cognitive systems has obvious implications for technical writing and how we choose to present information. While we've been looking at a lot of work in this class which seems to argue that women should not be considered any different than men in the workplace, I wonder how cognitive studies like this one can help technical communicators (or communicators of any type, for that matter) better generate systems which cater to both genders' inherent cognitive needs. I'm also interested in the fact that the results of female preferences were inconclusive. Did they state the reasons why they couldn't make any sort of generalization for the purpose of the study? This, to me, seems a real reason for a follow-up study, as this type of information really seems to be of use to our field (in my opinion, anyway).
They hypothesized that females would work better on a "wide" website (one with all possible options laid out immediately) rather than a "deep" website with a lot of sublevels. They designed their experiment to test this hypothesis, and they found that males worked better with "deeper" websites, and both sexes performed poorly with a "wide" website. Females performed better on a deeper website too, but didn't accomplish tasks as quickly as males did. This suggests to me that a website with a lot of options immediately cognitively overloads the user no matter the user's sex. The charts in the article indicate that the tasks took users anywhere from 2-8 minutes to accomplish. The websites were mock bookstore websites. From a usability perspective, even two minutes to accomplish a task on a website is an eternity (especially on a bookstore-type site). This suggests to me that the authors were just testing a bad website. The implications are very interesting, but I think the study needs to be replicated somehow with a more usable interface.
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