Men Look at Crotches

A kottke.org article led me to an interesting study done by Jakob Nielsen. The study delves into how to better present articles to an audience. It concludes many useful things for written articles such as including subheadings, bullets and good white space. More interesting however, was their findings in where different genders focus their attention when viewing images.

Women look almost exclusively at the targets face, while trying to gather information about the subject. Men, however, spend about half their time inspecting the face, and the other half inspecting the genitals. I find this amusing more than anything else.

The research into better formatting of content was interesting, but the section on men’s fixation on genitalia definitely held the most of my attention. I guess that tells us something about formatting data: include more interesting content.