{"id":565,"date":"2013-07-20T12:47:47","date_gmt":"2013-07-20T19:47:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/?p=565"},"modified":"2013-07-20T12:47:47","modified_gmt":"2013-07-20T19:47:47","slug":"stop-designing-for-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/2013\/07\/20\/stop-designing-for-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop Designing For Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’re designing or creating content on the Internet today, you need to remember one simple fact: Your audience has two<\/em> genders, not just one.<\/strong> It isn’t just men, it’s women, too — and the women outnumber the men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Take a look at this report from last year, on “10 Key Trends From the Banking Trenches<\/a>“. On slide number 27<\/a>, it displays the results of a Nielsen study on US digital consumers.<\/p>\n

The big take-away is right in the green dot in the middle: Women equal or outnumber men<\/strong> in every category except one. They make up 54% of social networking visitors (so men are only 46%), and they’re also beating men in video consumption by 53% over 47%. They are tied, dead even<\/strong>, for smartphone ownership. The only realm in which men are a bigger slice of the pie is in tablet ownership, where they reverse the 53\/47 split from video viewing.<\/p>\n

If you think tablet owners are as big a demographic as “people who view video online”, you have a serious problem. (Namely, you’re completely unaware of current Internet trends.) How much traffic does YouTube get every day? Then add Vevo and Vimeo to that… <\/p>\n

Aside: It’s interesting to note that tablet owners are also the demographic that includes the lowest percentage of whites<\/em>, at only 60%. I’m not sure why that is or what it means, but I welcome feedback and speculation.<\/p>\n

Yup, Women Play Games<\/h3>\n

Even gaming<\/em> isn’t a bastion of maleness. Study after study, reaching back at least seven years<\/a>, shows women making up the majority of casual gamers — and casual gaming is the biggest segment of gaming. Women age 25 and up not only make up the largest segment of gamers; they also spend the most total time online, outdoing the vaunted 12-24-year-old male segment<\/a> by a huge margin. In 2006, when I got a job at a casual games maker, it was well known around the office that roughly ⅔ of our customers were women aged 30-50; four years later, surveys were confirming that the average social gamer was (still) a 43-year-old woman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More recently, a Trinity University study showed the continuing trend<\/a> of young male gamers leaving gaming as they age, while more women start gaming as they age — and confirmed that the older (generally female) players spend more time gaming<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Even when we look at non-casual gaming, like MMORPGs, women are still well represented. As of November 25, 2012, Squidoo’s World of Warcraft statistics and Survey Poll<\/a> showed 65.4% male and 34.6% female players. Compare that to the Daedalus Project’s 2005 stat<\/a> of 84% male and 16% female, and — even accounting for the variability of Internet surveys — there’s a clear trend toward greater female inclusion<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Those Days Are Past — Long Past<\/h3>\n

If you ever wanted to make a joke about there being no women on the Internet, you’ll need a time machine. That joke was worn-out, tired, and passé ten or fifteen years ago<\/strong>. At this point, TV Tropes (whose population skews young and male, but fairly open-minded) lists “no girls on the Internet” as a Discredited Trope<\/a>, meaning it’s as hackneyed and false as things like:<\/p>\n