GenderMag and Cognitive Walkthroughs

GenderMag focuses on five facets of gender differences that have been extensively investigated in the literature pertaining to problem solving. It encapsulates them into a set of faceted personas to bring them to life, and embeds their use into a systematic process based on a gender specialization of the Cognitive Walkthrough (CW) [59, 63]. The five facets are:

Motivation: Research spanning over a decade has found that females tend (statistically) to be motivated to use technology for what they can accomplish with it, whereas males are often motivated by their enjoyment of technology per se [12, 13, 19, 31, 33, 37, 43, 57]. This difference can affect which software features users choose to use.

Information processing styles: To solve problems, people often need to process new information. Females are more likely (statistically) to process new information comprehensively-gathering fairly complete information before proceeding-but males are more likely to use selective styles-following the first promising information, then backtracking if needed [17, 22, 45, 46, 52]. Each style has advantages, but either is at a disadvantage when not supported by the software.

Computer self-efficacy: Self-efficacy is a person’s confidence about succeeding at a specific task, and influences their use of cognitive strategies, persistence, and strategies for coping with obstacles [3]. Empirical data have shown that females often have lower computer selfefficacy than males, and this can affect their behavior with technology [5, 6, 12, 13, 24, 32, 34, 43, 49, 50, 58].

Risk aversion: Research shows that females tend statistically to be more risk-averse than males [23], surveyed in [62], and meta-analyzed in [21]. These results span numerous decision-making domains, such as in ethical decisions, investment decisions, gambling decisions, health/safety decisions, career decisions, and others. Risk aversion with software usage can impact users’ decisions as to which feature sets to use.

Tinkering: Research across age groups and professions reports females being statistically less likely to playfully experiment (“tinker”) with software features new to them, compared to males. However, when females do tinker, they tend to be more likely to reflect during the process and thereby sometimes profit from it more than males do [6, 13, 18, 20, 33, 54].

Source: Finding Gender-Inclusiveness Software Issues with GenderMag: A Field Investigation

Cognitive Walkthroughs focus on just one attribute of usability, ease of learning.

Cognitive walkthroughs evaluate each step necessary to perform a task, attempting to uncover design errors that would interfere with learning by exploration. The method finds mismatches between users’ and designers’ conceptualization of a task.

The procedure uncovers explicit and implicit assumptions made by developers about users’ knowledge of the task and interface conventions. The evaluation procedure takes the form of a series of questions asked about each step in a task that are derived from a theory of learning by exploration.

Source: The Cognitive Walkthrough Method: A Practitioner’s Guide

Per the researchers, the five facets of the GenderMag method are backed by extensive empirical and theoretical work. Facets backed by at least 5 independent empirical studies were chosen, with some having 10 or 15. The majority of studies favor US populations and all are based on adults. Children are excluded from claims.

They realized that, really, it’s all about the facets. It’s not really about gender. It’s all about the facet values and being inclusive across the range of facet values.

I’m channeling Abby, and I do not like this software.

Source: Finding Gender-Inclusiveness Software Issues with GenderMag: A Field Investigation – YouTube

One thought on “GenderMag and Cognitive Walkthroughs

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s
