Designing for women

Tom Peters says that women don't buy brands, they join them.

The Femme Den offers five tenets of designing for women.

1. Emphasize benefits over features: Rather than touting features and specs (how fast or big or slick something is), make the product benefits clear. Who can it connect her to? How does it make her life easier? How will it save her time?
2. Learn her body: Women have different bone and muscle structures. Simply shrinking products leads to injury and frustration.
3. Craft a cohesive story: Women consider more than just the product itself. Design the whole experience with them in mind, from advertising and packaging to the retail environment and customer service.
4. Identify a spot on the spectrum: For some tasks women want to feel girly; for others, not at all. Nix the hyper-feminized stereotype and consider where on the spectrum this product should land.
5. Remember her life stages: Are you designing for a 25-year-old or a 65-year-old.

Additional thoughts from the Femme Den.

1. Avoid the lazy and mindless impulse to simply shrink it and pink it.
2. Men will walk into an electronics shop and look at the white card listing the features. Women will pick up the camera, flip it around, and look at the buttons. They want to know it is intuitive.
3. Women are more tuned in to the entire message of a product, from the store environment to the social causes it supports, how it fits into the home, and which family members will use it.
4. Physically, women are not miniature men.
5. Good products are not male products masquerading as unisex or - worse - hiding under a coat of pink paint.  

O.D.O.o.O.D.B.

(TY: Fast Company 10/09)