The Hindu Business Line : What women want

On a recent trip to Paris we went on the mandatory museum musings – the crowds were daunting and even worse were the long queues before the loos. It became part of our routine for the males in the group to wait patiently for me, as I waited inturn in the incredibly long lines that snaked out of the ladies’ toilet. On one such visit, I got chatting with a feisty American lady in the queue and I muttered plaintively, “I don’t know why they don’t have more loos for women”. “I know why,” she gesticulated forcefully, “these places are designed by men!” She pointed out that quite apart from the physiological differences which meant ladies took a longer time than men, statistics indicated that the majority of visitors in museums were women, not men. “They should’ve put in at least 3-4 times the amenities for women as there are for men”, she complained.

My queue buddy also gave me her trenchant view on mammograms, which monstrous mechanism she said, had obviously been designed by male scientists. “If penile cancer had the same frequency of occurrence as breast cancer, then we’d see some better design. We simply need more women designers,” she proclaimed. It’s an old bugbear with many women that we are forced to consume and utilise products and services that have been designed without considering the female perspective.

Contrary to what most designers appear to believe, basing products on feminine perspective does not mean that these should be baby-pink or spangled. Rather, women want their gadgets to be functional, simple to use and handy to carry, as opposed to research which indicates that men prefer joy-toys which confer status and have more bells and whistles on them, and impress friends. Women are less likely to be enamoured of tech for tech’s sake or to feign being tech-savvy if they are not: this forces a higher level of technology simplification as also a better level of customer service. Research indicates that women see technology as an enabling tool, allowing them to create, explore, express, be flexible, and empowered; in contrast, men described technology as a weapon, conferring power, speed, efficiency and autonomy.

Will greater involvement by women in the design process help bring in features and concepts that reflect these different world views? Not too long ago, Samsung Electronics used all-male focus groups to vet its phones, TVs, and home theatres - now it insists that half the reviewers be female. This resulted in the design of the DuoCam (the first two-lens digital camera and camcorder) based on feedback from women who were tired of lugging around two gizmos. Samsung attributes its design successes to better listening to women.

Volvo’s Your Concept Car (YCC) is another interesting case in point: it’s the first concept car to be designed from start to finish by a team composed exclusively of women. The impetus for the YCC was the fact that for Volvo, 54 per cent of its US buyers are women and the female customer base in Europe is growing. Having identified women as a key market group, Volvo set up an all-women team to create a customised car. Volvo surveys showed that women wanted want more than a safe, stylish car that goes fast, and also has plenty of storage, is easy to park, has good visibility, is easy to get in and out of, can be personalised and requires minimal maintenance. Consider the impact of this on the design of the car.

The shape of the car is lower and slants back slightly more, giving the driver excellent outward visibility.

Most female drivers find the petrol latches or caps a bit of a nuisance – eliminating these, there are, instead, two capless ball-valve filling points.

The car doesn’t have a hood. The design team figured its target audience wouldn’t feel any compulsion to pore over a raised hood and so the front section of the chassis can be lifted in a garage but does not open in the traditional manner.

Gull-wing doors allow easy entry.

Dirt doesn’t cling onto the easy-clean non-stick coating.

The run-flat tyres allow it to be driven to a safe distance after a puncture.

The seat pads and carpets can be adjusted periodically with different colours and textures, much like a living room.

The interior design maximises space and storage by shifting the gear stick and the parking brake to create a console that stores keys, mobile phones, cash, a handbag, a notebook, a cooler and a wastebasket.

I know many women who would love to have these features in their car. Interestingly, a later survey indicated that the four of the top five favourite features were common for both women and men, and as Volvo put it, “When you meet the expectations of women, you exceed the expectations of men.”

The YCC was born more as an effort to examine traditional design methods - Volvo did not intend to put the YCC into production, but expected to see many of its features finding their way into future cars. Perhaps, setting up “concept teams” on the lines of Volvo’s YCC would be far too ambitious for most organisations, but at the very least, if a product is meant for female consumption, it would be a good plot to have females on the design team, rather than base potentially expensive decisions on filtered second-hand experiences.

I remember doing a fly-on-the-wall act as part of a new-product diagnostic – observing a process from the sidelines before making recommendations. An all-male team was discussing a face pack being developed for women. The product champion was to report on the feedback from the concept-use test. He struggled through the description of how the product was to be used, and clawed at his face ineffectually in an effort to describe how it was put on and peeled off, much to the growing incomprehension of the (all-male) audience. When he came to the feedback of the users, he sank back with relief to repeat the comments verbatim. At the end of his presentation, it was clear that none of the product team and naturally, none of the evaluating senior management team, had any degree of empathy with how it was supposed to behave on the skin, or what the users were in search of. Luckily, it was early days and we were able to step in and fix the not-knowing-hence-doing-wrong gap.

What women want is neither a mystery nor rocket science, yet it is quite easy to alienate what could form a significant chunk of your product’s vote bank if their inputs are not incorporated while developing your new product.

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