91% of women says that many advertisers haven’t comprehended they wants. This is mostly because many marketers are still neglecting these facts, and create campaigns which mainly focus for universal gender. So, if you want to attract more female buyers, you need to create a good design that can influence their decisions, but before having knowledge about design for women, you may need to know some myths about them.
Myth 1: Women need their own gender-targeted websites.
Some companies may think that women need their own gender-targeted websites, one of them is Dell. Several years ago, Dell computers launched its girl version, named Della, a website pitching their new lightweight notebook computers. This site is dedicated to women, so Dell makes the packed with imagery of women and their laptops doing many of popular “female activities”, such as meditating in field, drinking coffee, and browsing the ‘net with their girlfriends. However, the respond is not as good as they are expected, so dell quickly changed some of the site’s languages to be less patronizing.
At some points, creating a product for a specific gender may not be a good idea as it will become a mistake of generalizing each segment, turning to commonly-held stereotypes.
If you, as web designers want to create a site that will be appreciated by women, you can learn from Apple, as it creates apple female friendly. It translates into the use of white space and fewer dividing elements or boxes if you want to design a site that appeals to woman.
Myth 2: Sites for women should be Pink
Opposite from the example above, Apple and Dell , which the products are generally aimed for every gender, if you create a product which is aimed only for a certain gender you can use a color that can be best represented their gender, such as Victoria Secret website that uses pink as part of their branding. VS website tastefully uses pink as an accent color rather than an all-over palette.
But this doesn’t mean that you should overwhelm the sites with pastel and pink until it looks like a Barbie theme, therefore you can also look for other design faux pas include:
- Scalloped borders
- Curly Victorian ornaments
- Script fonts
- Rounded corners on everything
Myth 3: Women need a lot of copy to convince them to purchase
Overwhelming woman with a lot of technical information is lousy. To attract woman in buying a product you need to replace your article into a more lifestyle copy. Therefore, a good copy should be concise, but persuasive. In fact, for women, it will be better for you to create female-friendly copy that considers the voice in which you are writing. Women will tend to love a copy that is more friendly and conversational than men.