Michael J. Silverstein writes:

“Women find themselves caught in an almost inescapable lack of time”.

They have developed certain techniques to cope with this: women like to multitask, and they use implicit to-do lists. This impact product management shown in the white-paper “The female Internet”.

To-Do Lists

The female way to deal with to-do lists is fundamentally different from the male way. Men try to resolve the most important things first – given a list they are expected to deal with the number one issue most.

Women use their to-do list more like a reminder. They want to resolve every topic on this list which has duties for the job, chores, kid’s care, relatives, friends, and for herself. A woman typically will pursue the most promising resolution for any item on the list. But looking for one thing can result in tracing another item when she stumbles upon it in the process.

A platform for women must minimize her overall search time, not just the time to close a single item on the to-do list.

www.dawanda.de or www.modcloth.com are an example for this: women can find exceptional goods, save time by directly ordering and they can trail away to get new ideas matching her to-do list.

Women’s Interface

Women use natural language; in fact they are best in describing what they want, when they can talk. Men hunt – for men refined searches using Boolean expressions, endless link clouds or Google’s 15 million pages found to an average keyword seem to have some use.

But how should the right interface for women look like? Every internet or telecom product manager should bear in mind, that this is not invented yet.  Computers have a hard time in understanding our talk.

Apart form this appearance matters: women take pride in a warm, orderly home and their own appearance. They value beauty also with products and services helping them to achieve this.

For this reason we should take the chance to design the user experience as appealing and as easy to use as possible:

• help: focus on customer value instead of your economic performance
• reduce: discontinue all applications which appear to be technical or little used
• arrange: spend time to arrange pages with pictures and the right level of detail
• integrate: seamless end-to-end processes help to save time

The importance of this work steps can hardly be exaggerated – the easier the interface, the more work is required. Future technological trends like multi-touch should be followed closely.

Today Apple is still one of the best examples for a felicitous user interface. Interesting user tests like Amazon’s Windowshop are available but presumably still perform worse than traditional interfaces.