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What Women Want: Designing Websites for Women

I’ve been trying to hunt down some research and credible resources that deal specifically with web design for women. I’m finding surprisingly little coverage on the topic. One of the few studies that I find referenced time and time again is the University of Glamorgan study conducted in 2005. A few key points from the findings:

  • 74% of sites were produced by a man or a predominantly male team while just 7% were designed by a female or female team.
  • 94% of websites were biased towards men and only 2% towards women.
  • In almost every case women preferred those sites designed by women and men showed a preference for those created by men.

There seems to be a pretty significant disconnect between the audience on the web and the design of most sites.

I’m writing about this because I’m thinking about redesigning the website for Dalia Koss Unique Jewelry. Since the target market for jewelry is obviously women, the look, function, and flow of the site should ideally appeal to women more than men. The current design is based on Shopify’s Tellus theme, one of a handful of themes available - if you notice all of them are designed by men. (I’ll review Shopify another day).

Maybe one of the reasons “web 2.0″ design has become so popular is because it appeals to more women (thereby increasing overall audience). Rounded edges, soft neutral background colors, and other web 2.0 traits do seem more in line with what women prefer.

If anyone is interested, I’ll do a case study and try to share my design decisions as I redesign the aforementioned jewelry website. Any women reading this, please feel free to offer up suggestions. I want to stay conscious of women’s preferences but I also don’t want to stereotype or pigeonhole the design into a false set of “women prefer this” parameters. Are there any good resources out there that deal with web design specifically for women?

January 8, 2007 · Filed under development, marketing, web 2.0

Markus said,

January 8, 2007 @ 10:40 am

I found this via Google search:
NOT what women want

I’m pretty sure Wal-mart is NOT what women want.

Tom Rose said,

January 8, 2007 @ 7:53 pm

Interesting that you say that “Web 2.0 design” appeals to women, because my experience has been the exact opposite. My wife constantly critcizes websites with big and goofy fonts, metallic (Apple-inspired) buttons and gradiants. She doesn’t understand why all websites (especially those designed by web standards advocates, like myself) have to look so masculine (and boring). I don’t know, maybe she’s an exception. I’m interested to see what you come up with on the jewelry site.

Mahesha said,

January 21, 2007 @ 7:28 am

I do not agree with you. I do not care about the website designer’s gender. I only care what the website contents and if they are useful I will re visit the website.
My advise is just keep your web contents simple as possible for people to download quickly, otherwise woman or man who ever will run away from it. Good luck.

Donna Fox said,

January 27, 2007 @ 2:20 pm

You may not think you agree, Mahesha.. but the point is, it doesn’t matter what your conscious mind thinks… your DNA means you have preferences.. you can’t help it!

In fact, women make 85% of the buying decisions, and this includes things like electronics and sporting goods that are usually considered “male” items.

I have a report on 6 guidelines to make sure your websites are women savvy here
http://www.wonderwomenoftheweb.com
(no opt in required.. but if you do, you get some great teleseminar replays)

and if you’d like to go deeper, I’d love to see you at the event.
Donna

Tim Bednar said,

February 11, 2007 @ 4:32 pm

I am a male web designer. I am working with a nonprofit client that works with women. The reaction to my first set of comps was to “soften” it up.

The first place I’m looking to is changing color (their brand colors are #873020 red and #567081 blue). My first round was mostly tints of the blue going to grey (gradients). This next round I’m just switching to red (too bad this red does not tint very well in my opinion). I’m unable to start introducing new warmer colors into the brand. So all I got is adding white, black, greys and tints of the red/blues.

I’ve already used gradients (which I think are softer) and rounded corners. What other basic design elements are “warmer”…

This is the 2nd or 3rd time this has occurred — so I’m really curious about how to create designs that are appealing to women.

Mike said,

August 19, 2008 @ 12:23 am

I recently worked with a female client - who had 1 male superior involved as well - and the project became a bit of a nightmare, with her thinking it should be one way and my firm pitching a design that the male client liked. She was never really able to articulate exactly what it was about the design but it didn’t ‘feel’ right for her. This was a resource site, so our approach was to make it very clinical, simple and focused on finding things fast. We took into account the fact that men and women, both individually and as a gender, simply find things differently - so we had various ways to approach the content. We did have ‘hard’ edges and corners, etc. but lots of clean white space, strong corp colors (based on their existing pantones) so I’m not sure what really would have ‘floated her boat’ in terms of the overall aesthetic.

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