Hey everyone. For this blog post, I will be talking about the study done by Margaret Burnett in regards to gender inclusive software. For our last HCI class we were given the assignment of watching Burnett’s conference video, Gender-Inclusive Software by Dr. Margaret Burnett, which can currently be found on YouTube.

Let me give you some background on the study. Nowadays, people use so many software applications such as: websites, mobile apps, word processing apps, and so on. If a person is in the computer science field or related to it, then they will use many more kinds of them which are harder to understand. The problem Burnett brings up is that every software has features that makes it difficult for people of different mindsets to use, which vary depending on gender. One of five factors she discussed were risk averse, which means how likely someone will take an action (like pressing a button on an app) which result vs experimenting around with different options. In her study she focused on 5 different factors.

Overall, it was quite fascinating to learn just how significant gender-inclusive software is. It’s something that a future developer myself will be wary of in the future so that all people from all walks of life can use my product as easily as possible.