Designing Gadgets For Women = Better Gadgets For All

When she recalls people’s initial reactions to the Palm Centro, one word sticks out for Stephanie Richardson. Cute. A device with a controversial keyboard, a device with an aging operating system, a device that’s supposed to attract a whole new market, and “cute” is the operative word? But for Richardson, the product marketing manager for the Centro, “cute” was a good sign. It meant that the market Palm was going after—under-35 individuals who had never owned a smart phone, many of them women—saw the Centro not as a collection of technological wizardry crammed into a small package, but a device that was accessible and friendly. “For this new audience, we needed to keep it simple,” Richardson said. “For a higher-end audience, you may throw all the bells and whistles at it, but we really had to think about what these people were going to use.” While it hasn’t exactly turned Palm’s fortunes around—the company posted a net loss of $67 million in the nine month period ending in February—Palm has sold more than a million Centros since the phone was launched last October. Palm achieved what it set out to do: More than 70 percent of Centro buyers were first-time smart phone users; twice as many women bought the device as did buy Treos; and Palm has seen a 150 percent increase in the number of users under 35. And it did so by thinking about women. What Women Want Now that the market is flooded with all manner of gizmos, companies need more ways to differentiate themselves, not just in aesthetics, but in how mobile technology is actually used. “We found that with this audience, and specifically with women, it’s a lot about balance,” Richardson said.. They can’t be sold specs. They need to be sold value or benefit. Instead of talking about broadband speed, it’s how you would use the messaging application, or the fact that you can take pictures and post them to your blog while you’re on the go.” “It’s become somewhat impossible for companies to ignore that women use technology, but a lot of what’s out there seems fairly superficial, in that things have been made pink,” said Mia Kim, the founder and editor-in-chief of Popgadget, a blog focused on women and technology. “Like Apple realized, something that’s easy to use and good to look at is something that’s going to appeal to men as well. The whole assumption is that you have to dumb things down for women, but men don’t have some gene that makes technology easier for them.” To be sure, men still dominate consumer electronics sales, accounting for $110 billion, or 55 percent, of all sales in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Individually, men also spend more on average—$1,163 over a 12-month period as opposed to $990 for women over the same time frame. Yet manufacturers can’t discount the $90 billion women spend on gadgets, or the fact that they influence 61 percent of all consumer-electronics purchases, an increase of 4 percent since 2004. The challenge for companies is that while women and men look for roughly the same things when buying a gadget, the level of importance of these criteria varies by gender. For example, women place a higher priority on setup (79 percent to 68 percent) and ease of operation (85 percent to 77 percent) than men, according to the CEA study, owing to the fact that they use these devices both at home and at work to a greater degree than men, and their own flexibility in juggling the two worlds has to be reflected in their gadgets. “Ten years ago, you may have had one cell phone in your home for emergency purposes,” said Tim Herbert, senior director of market research for the Consumer Electronics Association. “Today, you may have four cell phones in your home. The same thing is happening with digital cameras and other portable devices such as MP3 players, laptops, and so forth. So as the number of products in a home has increased, it has spurred greater interest in design. It’s not just a functional device that everyone in the home shares. You carry it with you wherever you go. It is a reflection of your personality and style.” And your personality is defined not solely in terms of your job or your home life, but an amalgamation of the two. While the blurring of work and play may seem like a recent phenomenon to chagrined thirtysomethings, one group of individuals has been straddling those two worlds for some time now. Making devices that would work well for women, regardless of their role as executive or Mom, would seem natural, right? A NOTEBOOK LINE GETS A MAKEOVER As companies have seen more women influence buying decisions, they have had to come up with ways to appeal to them but, in the process, have created devices and features that appeal to a much larger consumer segment. Nowhere is that more apparent than at Sony. “Our audience has expanded from predominantly male to much more varied end users,” said Xavier Lauwaert, the U.S. marketing product manager for Sony VAIO PCs. “Pretty much like a cell phone, a mobile PC is becoming part of your everyday life, and not only do OEMs want to differentiate themselves by design, but end users also want to differentiate themselves by buying something that is more design-oriented, color form, feels different, or even behaves different.” Sony took a look at its VAIO notebooks, already popular, and made a number of design changes to the CR series, first by shrinking the size from a 15.4-inch screen to a 13-inch LCD, adding multimedia controls, and offering a number of custom colors. “It’s more portable than a traditional notebook, because we wanted it to fit in a handbag, not just a backpack,” Lauwaert said. “We wanted to make it very colorful and stylish. So we used colors such as red and gold, which we had never done before, and we designed the unit with a very strong entertainment focus on it, because we believe that a female audience would use their PC for both work and play.” The CR series also addressed keyboard ergonomics in a new way. “One of our studies of females told us that keyboards and long fingernails don’t go very well together—a lady’s fingernails would get stuck,” Lauwaert said. “So we went with the separated keyboard, because it would reduce the amount of mistyping.” Sony realized that some of the features, such as the keyboard, could be applied to other products in its portfolio, and not necessarily ones that were as woman-focused. “It’s a mainstream feature,” Lauwaert explained. “Anybody and everybody can benefit from that. It’s something we’ll be expanding across our product lines, and will serve as a visual differentiator, and unification of the VAIO product line.” Design: Moving Beyond Pink One of the defining features of the VAIO line—indeed, any consumer electronics device that markets itself toward women—is the use of colors, such as pink, that provoke mixed reactions in its intended audience. In fact, many women don’t think of color first when picking a product. “We found that when you ask men and women what are some of the variables they consider when evaluating a product for purchase, things such as color and appearance are pretty far down the list,” Herbert said. “You have to satisfy the basic needs first, then you see elements such as color appear.” Color does play a role for women, but not necessarily in the way you might think. CEA’s study showed that 28 percent of women were more interested in having a choice of colors in consumer electronic products, compared to 8 percent of men. However, of the women polled, 59 percent of them didn’t want their gadgets to be pink. In fact, many women feel that a product’s color can send the wrong message, even when all other aspects of it are sound. “It’s not about feminity being expressed through color palette,” said Laura Jakobson, the brand strategy director at the design firm Hornall Anderson. “It used to be women had to claim, ‘I’m a woman and I can do this,’ and try to be proud to be a woman, but we’ve kind of transcended that.” So while companies may have initially thought about design in a female context, they were in fact designing products that would appeal to a whole new set of users, both men and women alike, who wanted to differentiate themselves with their cell phones as much as they did with their clothes or cars. In fact, designing products for a specific gender is, in many ways, too vague. Fickleness Forces Innovation Given that cell phones are highly personal products, it’s difficult to design a prototypical phone for women. Younghee Jung, a senior design manager at Nokia, travels around the world on behalf of the company to study how people interact with technology—and happens to be a woman. “We design phones based on how people relate to mobile phones,” Jung said. Some people are very into showing off, some are into experiencing something new, some are into using it as a work tool, some are into ease of use. It’s not actually according to gender.” Nokia’s line of N-series phones might not strike someone as particularly female-centric: They’re larger and heavier than other smart phones, come in a limited number of drab colors, and boast feature sets that would seem to appeal more to presumably geekier, early-adopting male consumers. As Jung noted, many women feel that high-end, high-featured phones are too big, and their keypads not the best for typing with long fingernails. Yet in Thailand, according to Jung, those same phones are very popular among women. “Our marketing manager mentioned that many women use N-series because it makes them look smarter compared to using some girlie phone,” Jung said. “You can’t really generalize what women want, because you always have to consider the trade-offs. If I do need and like the functions, I will probably overlook the size issues. Choosing a phone is a lot like choosing a boyfriend. You cannot look at just one aspect of the product—he may be handsome, but he may have a personality problem. A mobile phone is something that you wake up with and go to sleep with.” In places where there’s no electricity, the cell phone actually helps people find their beds. One such inspiration came from India, where Nokia discovered that women were using their cell phones’ screens to see in their un-electrified houses at night. From that insight, the company added a small LED light to the outside of some phones so that users could walk around without bumping into a wall. But it’s an idea that’s useful in other parts of the world, too. “A torch light can be used in many other contexts, like a parking lot or somewhere that’s particularly dark,” Jung said. Even though they may ultimately use products the same way as men, starting off with womens’ inspirations for product design may be more helpful in creating a device that works equally well in a number of environments. Factors such as ease of use, while important to both sexes, can become more refined through the crucible of a woman’s dual roles in society, as she balances both work and home life, and needs her technology to function equally well in both situations. “When it comes to inspiring a design solution, what women think is a very interesting place to start with,” said Jung. “If it’s good for women, it’s good for men, too.”