Feminist Design qualities are not unique to feminism, they come together to characterize feminist interaction and can be used to look at design in HCI more critically. It seeks to expose unintended consequences in design as well as identify the needs of the people who will use the product. The goal of feminist design is to make technology more accessible and inclusive for users.
GenderMAG
GenderMag (Gender Inclusiveness Magnifier) is a method devised to evaluate problem-solving software, to determine if they are gender inclusive. Software in general, tend to support the most represented group of 'relatively young, able bodied, males'. It functions a method to analyze and evaluate software based on 5 facets that have been empirically proven to be significant for gender differences. These facets are -
Motivation - This talks about what motivates people to use technology. Information Processing styles - This facet refers to the differences in how people process new information. Computer Self-Efficacy - A person's confidence about succeeding at a certain task is called self-efficacy and this facet discusses the variations of that confidence based on gender. Risk Aversion - This facet looks at decision making based on risks between genders. Tinkering - Tinkering is the playful experimentation with new features and research shows differences between tinkering behavior in relation to gender.
The GenderMag method relies on experts analyzing the software in question through a Cognitive Walkthrough (CW). This means that the evaluators would 'walk through' the software step by step, analyzing the usability at every point. GenderMag involves using personas as target users to evaluate the software for different archetypes of people. This method can be modified to suit the needs of the software and the personas kit is available online.
Concerns This method currently works with the gender binary and relies on research that is restrained by the same. The personas have been developed and structured to not be stereotypes but that is still a possibility. The personas that are part of this method are currently all white and geographically specific to Cardiff, Wales. This reduces the validity and usability of the method itself when looking at any other demographic.