Lecture 9 Flashcards
What is performativity of gender?
Gender is a “performative” spectrum in which people align themselves.
- Gender identity and expression can vary
- Gender as a concept is deeply entrenched within societal norms
Sex: biological characteristics
Gender: Features that are associated with social and cultural constructs that describe men and women.
What are three arguments of gender differences?
Essentialist: There are natural differences with how they think, behave etc. That’s the way things are so we need gendered designs.
Cultural: Men and women are very similar and any differences are due to society. We need gender-neutral designs.
Pragmatic: We are not sure if they are due to Nature or Nurture. We need systems that are gender-inclusive which support a variety of users.
What is GenderMag?
GenderMag is an analytical method used for evaluating software.
What are the five facets of gender differences?
1) Self efficacy (a form of confidence predictive of willingness to persevere)
2) Risk
3) Tinkering (playful experimentation)
4) Information Processing: females are more statistically likely to use comprehensive information processing styles - gathering fairly complete information before proceeding - whereas males are more statistically likely to use selective styles.
5) Motivation: females tend to be motivated to use technology for what it enables them to accomplish, whereas males’ motivations sometimes come from their enjoyment of the technology.
These can be used to create GenderMag Faceted personas.
GenderMag Cognitive Walkthrough
A standard cognitive walkthrough evaluates usability and learnability for a first-time user.
- In set-up phase, evaluator decides on scenario and a path through it.
- In analysis phase, for each “ideal” action the evaluator uses the prototype to step through the path, answering specific questions along the way about how the user would behave.
In GenderMag Cognitive Walkthrough questions are asked on each subgoal and each action.
