What do Women Want?

Convener: Lisa LeVasseur

Notes-taker(s): Lisa LeVasseur, Marion

Tags Gender, Women, Personal Data Ecosystem

Lisa's notes:

Hypothesis: Women’s needs/values/ expectations of what PDE’s can enable are different from men’s

Purpose of Session

• Open a dialogue for understanding women’s expectations regarding PDE-enabled services.
• Share this information to developers in the PDE space, because there may be opportunities.

Time Savings

• Auto Form Filling for me and my family
• Solutions must recognize that certain tasks are time sensitive
• Populating the PDS has to be painless
• Don’t make a new task for me
• Remember me, but
• Tell me what you’re doing (details, please)
• Be trustworthy
• Ask for my permission
• Customer Service should actually work

Trustworthy

• I’m suspicious of sites that aggregate too much of my information
• I want to aggregate things myself within the safe confines of my PDS
• I’m wary of bank services
• If I’m going to put all my and my family’s stuff in a PDS, it had better be secure (like military grade security)

Controlled Sharing

• I want to get vendor recommendations (reputations) from my social graph not strangers
• Especially from my female community (My Village)
• I want intelligent sharing to My Village, but I want to retain control and be in the loop
• To confirm
• I want easier ways to share and/or solicit feedback from My Village

Easy to Use, Reflects My Needs

• Technology should be smart enough to prevent me from accidentally torpedoing myself.
• And should be forgiving if I do.
• Technology should support my multi-tasking behavior
• Tasks are often accomplished in an interrupt driven fashion,
• Work with organic, non-linear task completion in mind
• My priorities “algorithms” have MANY factors and are deeply ingrained in my head; hard to instruct other people and services about.
• Often, I’d rather do it myself.

A Wife or Personal Assistant

• Calendar help and automation
• Supply Calendar – when I need to re-stock stuff
• Schedule Calendar – what I’m doing
• Automatically produce a journal/archive/historical reference that I can consult.
• Help me understand how I spend my time
• Weekly spending summaries,
• Activity summaries, etc.
• Help me not waste my time

Summary

• We want things to be more like people.
• We don’t want more ways to manage things

Marion's Notes

Women represent a superset

Solutions should be designed not just by men

Women want things to be more like people

Women are not only interested in managing things; women want:

customer care

more time

autoform filling for the entire family

trusted bill pay service; banks not considered trustworthy

remember me with permission, detail and trust

forgiving tech and pre-emptive

clarity

support multi-tasking in time and space

Women:

-dont trust services that aggregate information; women are skeptical. Women want the option of aggregating themselves within their own private domains

-have algorythms in their heads- they are variegated and they factor in their priorities

-want vendor reputation that is overlaid on social graphs especially within the female community (the my village concept)

-easy opportunity to share and get feedback from ones own village

-smart sharing and social graphs along with sole control

-want to be kept in the loop

-want what has historically been embodied in the image of a "wife"-- a holistically supportive, keep every detail of one's life in order and ever moving forward toward achievement and completion:

supply wife, scheduling wife,

-a calendar that works through female cognition

-a journal/history/archive

-a dashboard with summaries of spending

-a way to help me not waste time

-a weekly reflection and summary of activities that can/should/should not "carry over"