Knowing your demographic is crucial to designing an effective website. You can hone in on the unique characteristics of that demographic and deliver a quality user experience that’s effective. However, you want to avoid blatant pandering because it can be offensive. That’s exactly what has happened with Dell’s mini-site for women — Della.

Della Backlash

After an initial backlash from the premiere of the mini-site, they toned down some of the design and messaging but even with the updates it still feels borderline offensive. The most appalling messaging was in the “tips” sections where they opted to offer subject matter on calorie counting, recipe management and fitness. Rather than go that route, they could have highlighted useful functionality that women would appreciate such as size, portability and ease-of-use.

True, everybody looks at those features but you can write messaging that speaks to women specifically without offending them. For example, size and portability — if you’re a female looking to replace your heavy laptop, then this ad speaks about how the product helps you instead of pandering to female stereotypes:

“Flat Out Stunning”. If the headline was in pink, would women start uncontrollably buying Macbook Airs?

On Demographics

Corporations go to great lengths to understand the demographics of their customers so they can develop strategies. Sometimes, with the help of consultants and or specialized firms they make actual profiles of customers that are remarkably detailed. For instance, a profile may include gender, age, income and location but you may be surprised that they also gather information about offspring, sport team affiliation, television shows, hobbies and amount of disposable time for any given day.

The consultants and firms gather that information via paid surveys and the like with full participation of the customers so I’m not concerned with privacy but with how it’s used. My former company of employment (fitness industry) looked at that information and developed special programs that were beneficial to them such as if they had kids — they looked into child-care related offerings in addition to our core messaging centered around fitness. So our messaging would be; “We offer fitness and we make it convenient for you and your family” rather than pandering to women like; “Since you have children, you’ll like our fitness center” — which can be made more offensive if the visual design was overly skewed towards women.

Did They Fix It?

Unfortunately, despite the internet backlash — Dell still doesn’t seem to understand the essence of the problem. While it may be okay to target a specific demographic, they have choose to tone down the pandering rather than completely scrap it. Take a look at the new “Tips” section and see how instead of playing female stereotypes they overly simplify:

Sorry, but I’d say most females in 2009 are perfectly capable of operating a computer beyond these insultingly basic tasks. Seriously, #4 is referring to USB key drives right? IMO, that’s almost as offensive as the original!

As for their “featured artist” page, I question it’s entire premise and wonder if they should rename it “Pander-Land”. Dell is not making creative software like Adobe so I don’t understand the significance of having a “featured artist” page and not a “featured professional” page highlighting all the great female students, scientists, programmers, artists and other professionals out there:

In a traditional case study, individuals are featured to highlight their achievements relative to the product you are selling. It’s a great tool because it works as a testimonial, success story and highlights the product in ways a fact sheet can’t. So I find myself wondering why Dell chooses to forgo a traditional case study and instead opts for a simple bio and a video entitled “Darling Robyn: How to Score at Vintage Stores”. To me, it’s laziness or extreme pandering. I don’t understand what a female computer shopper is getting from this page.

Doing it Right

From Della, we understand what’s wrong but what can we do so that our future projects don’t suffer from the same mistakes?

1 — Research

It takes thoughtful consideration to bring a useful and effective website to the masses — even more so for one targeted to a specific demographic. Every industry is unique and different but if you do the leg work in finding out what is and is not acceptable then you just need to stay within those guidelines according to your judgment. Look at other websites that actually do a good job with design and messaging to women, such as:

Breastcancer.org uses an appealing palette, tasteful art direction in photos, illustrations and graphics as well as non-gender specific usability choices to deliver an effective website.

2 — Practical Benefits to Women

Instead of pandering, find out what women would love about your product and communicate that to them tastefully. In my experience, if you think the worst of your users, you’re really thinking the worst of yourself. You need to rise to the challenge and find a way to properly communicate your message without having to resort to blaming them for being what they are and using outdated stereotypical design concepts and ideas.

Although not specifically targeted to women, here’s another example from Apple that touts a universal benefit that would be well appreciated by women. For technology products, the benefits are usually non-gender specific. Dell perhaps could have done a better job offering answers about concerns females often have about their products that men don’t.

3 — Do Testing

The effort involved in testing will far outweigh the effort involved in trying to quell public outcry for the offense your website will have caused (as evidenced by Della). The problems with the Della website could have easily been avoided because they were so blatantly distasteful. I believe proper testing could have potentially caught this problem and saved them before they went live.

Female Dell employees were probably involved at some level creating the website but my best guess is that they were not in decision-making roles. Also, if they did testing — I don’t believe they assembled as diverse a group of testers as they should have. Assembling a range of female testers in age, tech savvy and profession should have been a priority for them if they did testing. Other than that, I would have also made sure I did a direct comparison to the normal website so the testers could understand the techniques used in targeting them and offer feedback. If the Della team did that, I would think the testers would have responded the same way the internet has.

Some people like Cnet’s Matt Hickey believe gender neutral is the way to go — like Dell’s normal home page for example.

Common Sense

Most men and women can both stand to be better educated about computers but Dell chose not to innovate by doing something new and perhaps helpful to the community. For instance — creating a non-gender specific mini-website that offers “how-to” advice on a variety of computer issues that would attract the less tech-savvy females (and men) they seem to covet. Another idea is to challenge your female demographic by offering a contest to any female who has bought a Dell notebook to create a video that helps educate people on the environment. My point is Dell took every shortcut along the way and paid for it at the end.

Around the internet:

What Do Women Want in a Laptop? — Jenna Wortham of the New York Times offers a level headed summary.

Big Aaargh! for Dell’s Della — Virginia of BlogHer does a great job rounding up reaction.

Dell Unveils New Site That Even My Dumb Vagina Can Understand. — Slackmistriss goes off on Della in one of the most entertaining posts

Dell’s Revamped ‘Della’ Site For Women — Forbes chronicles how Dell is allowing some negative comments about the campaign on the website.

Dell unveils Della website to help women choose which totally cute laptop they prefer — Engadget cracks some good jokes at Della’s expense.

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Agree or disagree? Comment!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Advertising, News, Tips, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.