Abstract

Interpret ng the Female User
suggests there is a market because Cosmopolitan has been going for years, look at
Vogue ...” (I-PT3, 2001, ll. 350-356).
The female senior producer advocated yet another reading of BEME.com design
associated with the notion of an online female community, as she described:
... if you want to focus on a particular group ... [you offer] something that’s going
to interest a certain amount of people and they’ll go there because they want to talk
to each other and they almost create their own community in their own site and ...
then you add content and build around information about your users as they sort
of come on board. (I-PT5, 2001, ll. 348-349)
For the female senior producer, BEME.com should have promoted an understanding
of the target audience as intelligent, comprehensive individuals engaging with worthwhile
content. These opposing views demonstrate that the design team represented
a variety of positions. Whilst mainly trading in stereotypical notions of femininity,
there were alternative interpretations. The female senior producer framed notions
of gender as a limitation based on her belief that gender driven sites do not attract
users. While there was a lot of attention paid to women’s portals, the press treated
their appearance as a passing phenomenon. And as BEME.com history has shown,
female users were not attracted to online portals that did not offer anything beyond
the content and outlook of a glossy magazine purchased on their way home.
Another very important factor affecting the design decision-making process stemmed
from the power structures defining BEME.com portal as a project. These were strongly
dependant on each participant’s position and relationship to the whole project. The
interviews revealed that a number of power struggles occurred at a point at which
participants felt they needed to maintain their own individual standpoint. Through
observations like “… she would have a tantrum actually … she was in control and
had to be ... in control” (I-PT5, 2001, ll. 311-313), the female senior producer made
reference to the difficulties for the team arising from the actions of one particular
member. However, problems were not only to do with individual characters. There is
evidence of a quite strong institutional power structure that generated hierarchies of
decision making and understanding of the positioning of the portal. There was then
a dynamic between personal agendas and these hierarchies. The tensions between
editors, artistic directors, or advertising directors regarding power and control over
decision-making processes, undeniably generated the platform of the BEME.com
design. Individual members began to believe that they were the vital link in the
production, which undermined the team, created disharmony, and dispersed the guiding
vision. Comments such as, “[w]hen the Managing Director of IPC Electric (the
digital division of IPC) resigned just before the launch of BEME due to a change in
the board of IPC, and his role was taken over by a magazine publisher who didn’t
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