Archive for the 'Electronics' Category

Analogic Solutions to Digital Problems, older people and mobile communication.

Published on November 10, 2009 in Electronics, Interesting, Mobile Phones, design process, older people and people centred design. 2 Comments

by Clara Gaggero

Older users, particularly older women, seem reluctant to use mobile technology on a daily basis. According to Ofcom, (The Consumer Experience 2008 Research Report) only 5% of people aged over 65 makes a phone call or sends a text on a daily basis.

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Samsung commissioned a research project to the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the Royal College of Art to tackle this issue. Adrian Westaway and myself  conducted the yearlong project, aimed at enabling older users to use and enjoy mobile technology.
Existing “solutions”, often known as Silver Phones, are stigmatising and disrespectful. They dumb down information instead of enabling the users to access them. We believed that creating another mobile phone with bigger screen and bigger buttons would not solve the problem. We believe that older people would benefit from gps, and other applications that mobile technology can offer nowadays.

We looked at the bigger picture, analysing the whole user journey. We worked closely with users of all ages and we soon discovered something staggering. After purchasing or receiving the phone, when opening the box, digitally savvy younger users approach immediately the phone and learn how to use it by trial and error; older people instead look for help inside the box. Help isn’t always there, manuals are merely legal requirements printed on flimsy paper and the packaging is a glorified egg carton. We noticed that the enthusiasm of having a new phone vanishes at this stage and many people feel frustrated and excluded.

But older people are not alone, 85% of all users report frustration in setting up a new phone. This shows how, by focusing on a defined user group and conducting a people centred design process, we can discover a big commercial opportunity.

We created three solutions, three analogical answer to digital problems. People are waiting six months or more to meet their daughters, sons or nieces, the “translators” that will explain them the phone or the digital camera’s features. We created three objects that act as interpreters between technology and the users.

The Book:
Most phones come with flimsy manuals with complicated language and jargon. These books, which can live on a bookshelf, actually contain the phone. Each page reveals the elements of the phone in the right order, helping the user to set up the sim card, the battery and even slide the case onto the phone.
The second book is the main manual – the phone actually slots into this and becomes the center of attention. Arrows point to the exact locations the user should press, avoiding confusion and eliminating the feeling of being lost in a menu.

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The Cards:
Phones have become over complicated and many users are afraid to break them or get lost in menus – so they don’t explore and learn all the things they can do. A set of cards represents every function inside the phone which users can flick through and discover. The phone is supplied empty, and users add the functions they want by tapping a card onto the screen. Cards can be carried in your wallet so functions can be accessed on the move. To encourage learning, the back of the card explains what the function does, and how to reach it using the menus.

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The Map:
Last but not least. To encourage users to explore and familiarize themselves with their phones a map was created, which guides users through the meandering labyrinth of menus. Users tests showed that people were quickly discovering and getting interested in new areas of their phone previously buried under layers of menus.

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Samsung was very pleased with the results of the research and is now developing internally the solutions to bring them to market. The company is looking for applying this direction not only to mobile phones but to a whole range of digital tools on the market – cameras, video recorder, mp3 players… -
Samsung will talk to its older customer in a way that will distinguish them to the competitors who dump down information and whose design is focused on disabilities rather than being inspired by abilities.

For more information please contact: info@claragaggero.com

Baby Geek

Published on August 16, 2009 in Electronics. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

If Microsoft can do it then I can go one better: My three year old son is reviewing the latest touch-screen laptop sent to me by HP: The HP Touchsmart TX2.  I had reservations about a touch smart screen as why would you need a touch screen on a laptop when you have a keyboard, but my son really loved it.  So did his favourite toy Serena…

The N97, the ultimate Symbian smartphone or Nokia’s big joke?

Published on August 11, 2009 in Electronics. 4 Comments

I have to admit that I was in a state of giddy anticipation when I got home to find that the courier had delivered a shiny new Nokia N97: It came in a under-stated black box which resembled a treat from a Regent Street boutique. It was a pleasure to unbox, as I appreciated the way it feels comfortable in my hands.

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The N97 is a radical new design, somewhere between a classic touch-screen like the iPhone and a keyboard-phone like the Blackberry. The whole device slides open with a very satisfying swing that just exudes quality engineering revealing an easy to use QUERTY thumb-pad and a joystick for people who do not enjoy using touch-screens. Other bloggers have complained about the angle of the slide: The screen is at approximately thirty degrees to the key-pad, and it’s impossible to push it flat. I never found that to be a problem because the shape of the phone when opened out makes it very easy to hold securely while typing and walking.

I agree with Susy Weaser when she says that the test of a good gadget is that you should not need to read the manual. It does not take me long to download the Facebook and Twitter application.

However, it takes me ages to find out how to change the basics: date and time, profiles, personalisation. I found the structure of the configuration application very confusing: It took half an hour to connect to one of the many WiFi access points in the house and even more time to download the Google Apps.

Nokia are pushing their “Ovi Store” as the one-stop shop for all applications, however I found that I couldn’t find the applications I wanted. The search did not seem to work at all.

In all I think I must have spent about twelve hours customising and tweaking the phone’s apps and settings before I had something which seemed vaguely right.

Speaking of customisations – the phone seemed to want to do it’s own thing: For example even though I set up my own Google Mail application and then the “Mail for Exchange” client (which can be used to connect to Google’s calendar and tasks) it still insisted on forcing me to set up Nokia’s own mail software each time I powered on the phone. Even after I relented and signed up for “Ovi Mail” it still wanted me to set up the mail service every time I switched the phone on, which happened rather a lot given the phone’s tendency to crash in the middle of whatever I happened to be doing.

And on the subject of reliability: The Symbian platform is known for it’s dependable full-featured phones. I’ve been using Nokia’s S60 phones for more than three years. Unfortunately somebody in Nokia’s testing department must have been on holiday when they were preparing this for release: Even after upgrading all the software to the latest version this phone crashed two or three times per day. It usually happened at the least appropriate time, such as when I was talking on the phone.

The most annoying bug was a quirk on the key-lock: If left un-used for a minute the device automatically locks it’s keyboard to prevent accidental dialling. You are supposed to be able to unlock it by simply flicking the keylock switch on the side, however from time to time it would decide to ignore this. Other than removing the battery to hard-reset the phone I could find no way to get back in control of the device. Given that this happened two or three times a week I’m astonished that Nokia’s quality-control people did not spot this problem.

Finally, my biggest gripe is the screen itself: It looks just like any other mobile phone touch-screen however unless you push it quite hard nothing happens. I found it required quite a bit of pressure to make it work, and then given the force you have to use it becomes very imprecise so I often found myself pressing the wrong button by mistake. The N97’s touch-screen is really quite clumsy. It’s got no multi-touch and Nokia cheekily bundle a little stylus with the phone – suggesting that Nokia are well aware that this touch-screen is not intended for touching.

The iPhone has already set the standard for a touch-screen.  Everybody knows how well the iPhone works – you can touch it with one or two fingers. You can manipulate images on screen with easy to learn gestures. You do not need a stylus or any special accessory to use it. Like most modern touch-screens the iPhone, HTC Magic, Palm Pre and pretty much everybody else uses a “capacitive” screen which can sense the presence of your fingertips without the need to push. The N97 uses an older generation of screen known as “Resistive” – it’s the same kind of screen that you find on a Nintendo DS. This cheaper sort of screen relies on actual pressure in order to register input.

Please do not mistake me for an Apple fan, it’s just that I recognise that they got it right whereas Nokia got it wrong. And that’s a real shame because the screen was supposed to be the biggest selling point of this new machine. I cannot think why Nokia decided to go 2nd best for the phone’s main feature.

The N97 is packed with features, cool things like a built in FM transmitter, the best mobile-camera on the market, and an email application that easily rival’s Blackberry’s flagship. On paper this looks like the best phone ever made however silly design mistakes frequent annoying bugs makes me reluctant to recommend this product. Other than the screen (which a great many people will not find a problem), all of the phone’s problems are to do with it’s software so in theory Nokia could release an update which corrects all of the phone’s faults. Rumor has it that they will be releasing a refreshed version of the N97 with an improved screen (but without the joypad) – I hope that Nokia can pull it off second time around.

Finally, it’s been said that the N97 is one of the most eccentric products that Nokia have ever made: The week before I had to give it back they sent me an even more bizarre product to review. It’s supposed to be an “anti-theft” device for the N97. You clip your state of the art Nokia into what looks like an early 1980’s phone and then run an application which is intended to make the N97’s screen look exactly like an old-fashion phone keypad.

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The end result is that your N97 is made to look like something that Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting might have used.  My kids love it.  It shows that even if they did not get the N97 completely right, Nokia has a sense of humour.

What do women care about

Published on July 20, 2009 in Articles and Electronics. 0 Comments

The idea that women are afraid of technology or that they do not use technology as much as male consumers is outdated. In business and in personal use, women make up a large percent of tech users, especially in computer and Internet use. So how, as a technology business owner or marketer, can you attract this large customer base at the same time you pursue teens, male consumers, and other demographics? In order to successfully make your tech products and systems appealing to women customers, you need to understand the ways in which they are influencing the market and other buyers.
1. Women care about “green” technology products. Studies have shown that women are more likely to boycott products that do not implement fair trade practices or that ignore environmental protection recommendations. If you want to keep up with the competition, make sure your products are energy efficient and that your business makes a point to recycle, give back to the community and produce technology through systems that do minimal harm to the environment.
2. They look for products that are multi-functional. Women who are active in the workforce as well as full-time caregivers look for products that can meet all the demands of their lives. You will need to prove that your product can handle extra applications, customizable features and other tools that streamline a customer’s entire life.
3. They monitor what their kids buy. Women who are savvy customers don’t just research their own purchases: they also monitor the things that their kids buy, or the tech toys that they buy for their kids. Remember that when marketing to kids, you’re also marketing to parents, so include features like parental controls, safety and privacy settings, and heavy-duty hardware.
4. They’ve amped up the desire for attractive tech toys. Now that women are investing more and more in technology, tech marketers need to come up with new designs that are aesthetically pleasing. Clunky, awkward laptops that aren’t attractive will never sell to a modern, mobile woman.
5. Women like being informed. Don’t make it impossible to find information about your product, including price, the types of materials used, tech support and energy efficiency. If you bury all of that information behind a snazzy ad, your customer will just head to another seller who is happy to share product information with the customers.

This post was contributed by Tara Miller, who writes about the best online degrees; TaraMillerr00@yahoo.com

Della; doomed to fail or destined to succeed?

Published on May 28, 2009 in Articles and Electronics. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

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My WARC conference presentation stressed that the best way to market to women is to be inclusive rather than to simply overtly exclude men. Nevertheless, most marketing activities aimed at women do so simply by shutting-out the other gender. It’s a mirror-image of the current marketing worst-practice. Della, the new netbook sales portal from dell is a pastel-pink feminized counterpart to the unapologetically ultra-masculine Dell.com. It’s a perfect example of the current trend of exclusion marketing.

I remember interviewing one Lady Geek who told me in no uncertain terms that the ‘Dixons Women’s Only night’ was her idea of hell.

“What are they going to do, give me cheese and pineapple on a stick and tell me how to turn the telly on?”

Not exactly the response that Dixons were looking for, and in my experience a strategy which never works quite as well as the men who invented it might expect.

Marketing to women should not feel like “an initiative” i.e that a group of 40 something balding marketing men have been sitting in the boardroom and some bright spark says ‘We need to appeal to women. I know, lets create a portal for women, pink up and dumb down our products…we could even call it Della…(guffaw guffaw)

I admire Dell’s intent. Its brave. It shows that they recognizes that in the current environment, its a smart strategy to improve your bottom line by targeting women. I’m skeptical that Dell will achieve their objectives for two reasons:

Firstly,  do they really have a long-term commitment to growing the female market? Dell has a history of superficial and short-term business strategies such last year’s half-hearted flirtation with Linux . Is there any commitment to go beyond the shell of rebranding and create something which will profoundly appeal to this new market? As Elisabeth Kelan states, when you open the Inspiron artistic shell, its just an ordinary dull Dell laptop underneath.  How much of the products and community parts of the site have been specifically developed with women in mind rather than been re-skinned to appeal to women?

Secondly, I do not think that Dell have achieved a depth of understanding of their new female audience. Evidence of this is the handy lifestyle tips which state the excessively obvious. We also find the usual marketing copy cliches such as ‘giving extension to your digital life’ (I don’t want a digital life, I want a life with technology in it) and ‘enhance your life with technology’ and the ‘giving’ section – it’s the kind of vacuous text that means absolutely nothing.

From a product perspective, the site makes a big deal of their pretty new Inspiron Netbooks, however there’s not a whole lot else on the site – yet another echo of Dell’s failed Linux strategy which also presented an absurdly limited subset of Dell’s quite massive portfolio of products.

My research conducted with Jupiter found that a third of British women are frustrated, alienated and bored by the way tech companies market to them. Despite this most tech marketers are in denial about what must be done: There is plenty which can be done- it just needs to be executed and approached in the right way.

Strategies tech brands need to apply;

1) Go for an implicit strategy appealing to women rather than creating an overt exclusive ’silo’. Overt branding such as Della, Dixon’s Women’s Only nights and Comets Angels give out wrong signals. Nintendo spent hundreds of dollars understanding women and their fitness regimes but never overtly positioned Wii Fit as ‘gaming for girls.’

2) Make women the heart of your strategy not the icing on the cake. Nike Women has invested millions and is part of a strategy which demonstrates Nike’s long term commitment to women. It goes beyond flogging products and starts to offer real benefits.

3) Develop an authentic understanding of women and what they want before you embark on women only strategies. Employ experts such as the Lady Geeks (shameless plug) who will help you go beyond the superficial and can deliver your proposition in a way that is not going to get women irritated. Dell have lost touch with the reality of those women its trying to sell to.

4) Position technology as entertainment rather than a female or male pursuit. Jeremy Clarkson, has equal appeal and ratings amongst both sexes. Rather than talk about the technical aspects of a car in a dry way, he has used humour and entertainment as a way to make cars appealing.

Della is a somewhat superficial step in the right direction. Lets just hope Dell listen to their customers and radically overhaul Della the concept before it becomes yet another of Dell’s six-month flirtations.

Tech Porn is dead

Published on January 20, 2009 in Articles and Electronics. 4 Comments

This is the 21st century right?. I pick up the T3 2009 calendar and can’t believe what I am seeing. I check it is 2009 and I have not found a vintage copy of the 1979 edition. Each month has a gadget of the month with a erotic shot of a girl ‘wet’ with excitement holding a strategically placed gadget in her legs, arms, breasts. January we have a woman with a see through slip on in water holding an android phone. February we have a women kneeling in hot steam holding an ‘eco gadget’. March shows us a women with a touchscreen strategically placed in her bikini. Do I need to go on?

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In my previous post, I demonstrated that women are a growth market while male markets are saturated. Marketers missing out on a £5billion pot of gold (a conservative figure according to Jupiter), I predict T3 will be out of business in a year. Their magazine relies on its core audience of “sexually repressed nerds” according to Wikipedia. All of whom have the skills to download real porn from bit torrent and don’t need this half-hearted house tech-porn.

Showing the calendar to some male colleagues, one told me the only place he could see the calendar was “on the wall of kwik fit”. Hardly an aspirational image for your average man with disposable cash. If you are trying to woo a girl, and she walks into your bedroom and see a copy of T3 or worse, the T3 2009 calendar, what sort of signal does that send? Even a sexually repressed nerd can think that one through. Some of the advertising in T3 is no better, this Asus ad being a good example.

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Rather than default to a out of date, lazy way of selling technology to men at the expense of attracting women, technology brands need to be more innovative with their media strategies. Technology has become so accessible and embedded into our culture, that the hard sell of technology is no longer needed. There is no such thing as Early Adopters.

Tech brands need to think innovatively about to communicate to both men and women and buying a media strategy of tech porn like T3 just ain’t going to cut it. What brands need to do:

1. Leverage the blogging community as they are the key influencers. Panasonic are doing this at CES. Who are you more like to trust for a product review- a blogger or a paid for reviewer?

2. Connecting your audience to like minded people is a great way to earn their respect and ultimately their trust. Hewlett Packard used ‘brandalists’- legal grafitti artists to get their HYPE message across and generated so much positive WoM.

3. Be brave. Be rebellious. And dont waste money on advertising in magazines like T3. Goodbye T3 and Good Luck.

Goodbye Men, Hello Ladies

Published on January 9, 2009 in Articles, Electronics, Games and Home Entertainment. 1 Comment

Jerry yang, Yahoo’s ex chief exec announced that the advertising industry was facing the toughest downturn in decades. The age of extravagance is gone. The age of the hangover is here. No more big marketing budgets with money to trial and test cool ideas. Its about ROI. Its about bold, strong brands having a clear positioning. Tough times need solid, focused leadership, a lesson that Woolworths learnt the hard way.

Napoleon declared the essence of strategy is sacrifice. Never has this been more true than in the current climate. And the sacrifice should be allocating marketing spend to men- a well saturated market. Lad’s mags are already pregnant with tech-brands competing for their attention. Women are the financial opportunity and Jupiter estimate marketers are missing out on £0.5billion by not marketing to women.

Out of every 10 gadgets, 4 are bought by women. And no before you ask we are not talking about fridges and washing machines. More women than men play games between the age of 24-35 than men now And we are not just talking the Sims. World of Warcraft now has 50% female players.

The research I conducted with Jupiter highlighted (now Forrester), ownership is on a par with men in most categories. Couple that with the fastest growing segment on social networks is married women with children. And according to an N-vision survey, December 2008, approx 40% of women are transacting on the Internet (ie spending money rather than just using the Internet for communication, information and entertainment) compared to 30% of men. Hence, Women are no longer a niche audience – they are the budget-holders and drivers of growth.

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The editor of marie claire is right when she says:

“When it comes to tech brands and women, technology companies are in the same place the cars industry was 20 years ago.”

With the exception of Nintendo and it’s Wii, Apple, no other brand is talking the female language. I agree with Hilary Chilura when she says:

“Like nervous teenage boys at a junior high-school dance, tech marketers haven’t figured out how to talk to women”.

Ask any family who was in charge of buying the Christmas gifts, and you’ll find out its women not men. Women are not only buying technology for themselves, but as the Chief Household Officer, are buying for kids, husband, gran and friends. Women are in charge of the house, but more importantly are in charge of the living room (see Battle for the Living Room) where many of the technology lives: PVR, console, HD TV…. In my house, its my husband who lives in ‘his’ world but its me who lives in the ‘real’ world. I am deciding what we should cut back on, how much we can save and what we will buy when it comes to technology.

If tech brands want to be successful, they should focus on women at the expense of men. Women are no longer ‘the Second Sex. ‘ Rather the most profitable sex.

I am a PC

Published on December 8, 2008 in Articles and Electronics. 3 Comments

At first when I heard about the Microsoft “I am a PC” ads, my first instinct was that the world’s biggest computer company should not feel the need to respond to Apple’s “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” ads which had aired more than six months ago. It signified that not only that they gave a damn but also they were likely to loose control of the debate.

After seeing the hundreth Apple ad mimicking and stereotyping the Microsoft user, I started to see Apple as the bully of the playground. Poking fun at the perceived ‘not so cool’ Microsoft user was like the ‘IT’ girl in the playground with the cooler nike trainers picking on others. Microsoft approached me to be in the I am a PC – you can see my VT here:

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I wanted to do it not only to get the Lady Geek brand out there but more importantly, I am tired of the unconditional and undeserving love people have for the Apple brand. The original reason for the Apple brand being so desired, was clearly a great product but also this idea of being the underdog and a brand for the non conformist.

With Apple’s growth rate surpassing Microsoft, has Apple become the brand for the lazy conformist? The person who can’t think past the mac tax and see the new sexier brands like asus and acer chomping at their heels? Is Apple’s behaviour precisely the behaviour of that which they criticized Microsoft? Have the tables turned? And ultimately, do the I am PC ads successfully connect women with Microsoft?

I showed some Lady Geeks the ads and they got an encouraging response. With comments from ‘I love the stories behind the technology’ to ‘it made me reappraise the role of technology in my life.’ If its objective is to build the brand ethos first and foremost, its clearly successful. It has managed to move away from the technology and product specs and talk about what technology means to women and what they care about. It achieves Malcolm Gladwell’s fundamental question of what can Microsoft mean to people over and above being a software developer.

But if its aim was to get people to reappraise Vista, then there is a fundamental problem to solve. I asked my female colleagues at work what they knew about Microsoft Vista. All are tech literate, bright and articulate 20 and 30 somethings. I got answers ranging from ‘is it a credit card?’ to ’something on my computer but I am not sure what.’ The majority of women don’t know or care what an operating system is, and could not identify Microsoft’s flagship product as an example of an operating system.

Meanwhile Apple seem to have no difficulty communicating the value of OSX – it seems as if every insignificant widget is trumpeted as if it were the greatest development in computing since the invention of the mouse. Apple are fortunate to have fans who create a reality-distortion field through which apple’s products appear magical – and under the same lens Microsoft’s products are by definition the exact opposite.

Lovers generally tend to overlook the faults in the object of their affection and Apple have been very good at building that kind of affection amongst their audience. Microsoft have never invested in building any kind of emotional connection with their audience – which is what makes their new campaign such a significant departure from their normal product-focused, conservative advertising. With the imminent launch of Windows 7, Microsoft claim to have fixed the technical issues that disappointed so many Vista users – now the goal should be to fix the marketing so that women understand and care about this thing that Microsoft have made, and understand how how it enhances their life.

“When you are going through hell, keep going”

Published on September 8, 2008 in Articles and Electronics. 1 Comment

Ok, it wasn’t hell. But it certainly wasn’t heaven; it was something in between. I was shopping for a new digital ‘point and shoot‘ camera. Like many women, I didn’t have much time to research different options online (Lady Geek research found than men research technology purchases more than women) so, like most female shoppers I came to my “retail experience” with no preconceptions. Since it was the only shop likely to be open on a Sunday morning, I went for Curry’s.

I wanted a camera indulge in my fantasy of being an undercover researcher. I told Vinesh, the shop assistant, I needed something small within the £100-150 price range, light and easy to use. Vinesh was quite informed and didn’t make me feel dumb or ‘female’, explaining that the type of lens was more important than the pixels. He showed me the Panasonic Lumix and the Sony CyberShot – The obvious choices – the most reputable brands.

Vinesh failed to ask me a fundamental question: whether I wanted to use the camera mainly indoors or in sunlight which I think is pivotal to anyone’s choice when buying a camera. I told him I’d heard about Fujifilm’s cameras being particuarly suitable for the kind of indoor photography that interests me.

He agreed; I ended up buying the Fuji.

I received my camera in a drab box.

I rummaged inside the box for the soft-case so I could at least protect my exciting new purchase. I was dismayed to find out that having paid two hundred quid for a camera it did not come with the most essential of accessories. I felt let down. It was as if I had just had a trip to the dentist. I was relieved it was all over. It wasn’t exciting. It certainly was not fun.

Compare this to the buzz I got when I bought a new dress the week before. I could hardly contain my excitement in the shop. I felt like a small child in a candy store. I got a posh bag. My dress was wrapped in tissue paper and smelt expensive. I even got a free magazine for ‘valued’ customers. It felt luxurious.

I love my camera. I love what I can do with it. Its seems pretty intuitive to use. My excitement comes from using the product. But what could have been an ‘experience’ to be enjoyed and savoured post-purchase was one easily forgotten.

If tech brands are asking women to divert their spend to technology, they need to provide a sensual, tactile and intimate experience with marketing that appeals to their senses as well as their purses.

Part of this is the whole experience, which includes not only the retail environment but the unveiling and ritualistic opening of the product when you get it home and peripherals are a big part of “making something my own” for women (The Japanese are particularly good at recognising this market.) So whilst I won’t rush to go technology shopping for a while, I am keen to get taking some good pictures for this blog.

We are our choices

Published on August 14, 2008 in Electronics. 0 Comments

We’ve just completed some interesting work about people’s relationship with technology.

Classical research theory assumes that our decisions are based on conscious, rational thought or reflex ’snap’ decisions. These days most psychotherapists have come to the conclusion that the truth is somewhat more complex: decisions are often post-rationalisations and snap decisions are backed up by a lifetime of knowledge.

Our client had previously spent thousands of pounds on ‘traditional’ research which failed to reveal anything substantially new. The planner, had been traveling around the country, night after night, suburb after suburb and was exhausted at the prospect of doing yet more research.

We decided to change our approach and run an ethnographic style study.  We assembled our ‘SWAT’ team of researchers, each was sent to ‘live’ with the subjects of our research: We spent time in their homes. We went shopping with couples buying technology and ‘hung out’ with families, observing their relationship with household technology.

The study revealed a great deal of new insights about how gender influences technology use, for example men often have their PC/Laptop in their ‘den’- its a retreat, its a hide out, a solace place where they can internalize ‘their’ time.  We saw how women use their PC/laptop in the heart of the home. Many women used their laptops to manage the household and ensure things run smoothly: Its used to make sure the shopping online is ordered, help the kids with their homework and keep them in touch with their friends via social networking sites.

We watched how couples shop for technology and the very different roles they take:  Women tend to be more concerned about how the device will ‘fit’ into their home.  Whether it will be a beautiful addition to the home, not just in terms of design but in functionality and ergonomics. This is a motive that so many tech-brands misinterpret as “women only care what the technology looks like“. Men tend to want to make sure that what they are buying is “right” piece of kit.  Not in terms of their home but more in terms of what it will purportedly do.

While the differences are obvious, what unifies men and women is that buying technology is an emotional decision: This does not mean that it is irrational. An emotional decision can be very rational as our feelings are informed by a lifetime of experience. As the neuroscientist, David Lewis states,

“Our conscious is a bit like a PR company.  It justifies our decisions on an intellectual level and seeks to explain behavior that feels right“

The ‘PR’ bit is what ‘respondents’ had been articulating in the focus group.  The planner told me,

“I realized that for 2 years people had been lying to us in focus groups.  Not because they deliberately set out to lie but because they either couldn’t articulate it or were too embarrassed to tell us what they really felt about buying technology”

There are 3 types of decision making.  The first type is the truly instant decision. The second type are those which appear instant but actually access our vast network of experiences, however we often refer to them as based on our ‘gut instinct.’ The last type is the mathematical way to approach them which is cost benefit analysis. Received wisdom has it that the vast majority of choices are of the first and third type, however the more I observe people in the act of making choices the more I realize that the way people shop is neither frivolous nor analytical but something in between.

As Sartre stated, we are our choices.  If only technology companies spent a little more time trying to understand why we do what we do on a deeper level, then maybe so many women wouldn’t feel so frustrated and bored when it comes to buying technology.