The Fun of Figuring Things Out – women, design and simplicity Rebekah Rousi University of Jyväskylä PO Box 35, 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland
[email protected] ABSTRACT
Feminine design and women’s thinking are hot topics this season. On the priority list are technological products, user interfaces and vehicles, which are simple, easy-to-use, and allow the user to focus on the important things in life, such as family. By automating operation and minimizing interactions, the fun of product usage itself is also reduced. Designs do not need additional playful elements to be fun. Fun arises through learning, understanding and mastering usage. Good design, and simplicity, is the organization of complex systems in a way that makes sense to all users. There are three main points to this paper: 1) product usage should be exciting in itself; 2) women want in on this excitement, do not equate feminine design, to reduced or basic interactions; and 3) simplicity is the effective organization of complex systems, not reductionism. It takes more than one button to keep a woman interested. Author Keywords
Gender; design; simplicity; joy-of-use; fun; cognition. ACM Classification Keywords
H.1. Information Systems (H.1.2.): User/Machine Systems INTRODUCTION
If gender was ever a popular topic, now is the time it headlines everywhere. Designers, marketers and scientists are mulling over ideas on what gender, and in particular, women’s thinking can reveal about the world’s greatest secrets. This includes none-the-least, designers who believe that if you can design for women, you can design for everyone. She “wants everything a man wants in terms of style, performance and status, but she wants even more” [23]. This “more” generally materializes in less, less buttons, less functions, less factors that the user needs to Paste the appropriate copyright/license statement here. ACM now supports three different publication options: • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single-spaced in TimesNewRoman 8 point font. Please do not change or modify the size of this text box.
consider in terms of use, operation and maintenance – as seen in the case of Volvo’s YCC concept car [23], the driver no longer needs to change the tire if it punctures, as it has flat wheels which can be driven to the nearest garage. Nor does the driver need to raise the bonnet to refill the windscreen washer reservoirs, as the opening is located next to the petrol tank. Added to this, another prominent design company which promotes its dedication to feminine interaction design uses the baseline of approaching design as if every time (every usage) is the first time. This makes sense when designing systems which are seldom used by everyone such as statistics software, or webpage builders, but including this ethos in the design of everyday products, renders the objects to being little more than ‘one button wonders’. Not only does it reduce user interfaces in particular to interaction via one or no buttons, but it decreases control and intuitiveness through eliminating the user’s points of interaction (POIs) with the system. The irony is, that at the same time as companies claim to be listening to women, and designing for the demanding, fickle yet ‘simpleton’ users, a rebellion is on the rise. Bloggers in particular, are taking up the mission of problematizing the ‘pink’, of contextualizing the ‘too difficult for women’ myth, by emphasizing the fact that women love tech too. Wikis such as the GeekFeminismWiki, and bloggers like Ti Chang and Casey Johnston are tearing into this wave of socalled feminine friendly designers and companies, who have placed women on Venus, to show that the question is about good design and finding the balance – between ease and difficulty, in symmetry, consistency, the material and immaterial. As John Maeda [12] states, “Good design is about clarity over style, and accountability over ego”. It is at this point that confusion over terms and concepts becomes apparent. Simplicity is often mixed with minimalism and reduction [20, 21], bringing designs and systems back to the bare basics. Simplicity is also seen as a condescending element of ease exemplified in phrases such as: it so “simple, your mother could do it” [5]. This could be interpreted as, ‘reduced functions and options equals no opportunities to get things wrong’. An example of this can be seen in the heavily criticized ePad Femme (see Figure 1), produced by the EuroStar Group. This tablet not only features a default pink-violet background, but recipes,
shopping tips and yoga instruction apps are preloaded for “a woman who might find difficulties in terms of downloading these applications…” [17].
Figure 1: ePad Femme This paper is about fun, and the joy of figuring things out. It emphasizes the excitement of learning and the thrill of mastering operation, through analyzing attractive designs in terms of their points of interaction (POIs) – i.e., buttons, knobs and functions – and the way women and men talk about the devices. It involves the game involved in regular use and design of everyday technologies, without any additional gamified elements. It problematizes so-called feminine design principles of treating every usage as a first encounter – eliminating the need to learn – by elaborating on the specifics of simplicity. Simplicity is learnable, requires learning and learning enables simplicity [4]. Simplicity is beautiful, yet “We
