Abstract

Interpret ng the Female User
of personal interpretations. Therefore, BEME.com became embroiled in a process
of continuous negotiation of different understandings of what a commercial WWW
space for female users ought to be. Moreover, socially, culturally, and politically
placed underlying factors informed the design team’s conceptualisation of the
BEME.com experience. These were central to the visual, designed outcomes, supported
by a collective knowledge used to rationalise the existence of BEME.com as
a design product. These factors illustrate how deeply design processes are rooted in
the social, cultural, and political conditions of everyday reality. At the same time,
the designed products/experiences are implicated in the perpetuation of these factors,
leaving minimal room for searching out alternatives. Moreover, the design
process and the underlying factors offer important insight as to how Web designers
interpreted the tasks at hand in relation to the audience and the client. Considering
that BEME.com was created at the beginning of the WWW boom, these underlying
factors functioned as primary sources of understanding of the unknown and newly
developed WWW technologies. In this case, the motivation of the client to bring
in Web design expertise derived from a need to maintain their position of power
within a specific marketplace; a need which became the driving force. However, it
was also something that limited the knowledge of those involved in the production
process. Moreover, this need defined the way in which users were interpreted by
both the client and the Web designer. In the case of BEME.com, this interpretation
was based on gendered understandings grounded in historical continuities derived
from both the design industry and women’s magazine publishing.
Although the nature of Web designers’ knowledge changes throughout the design
process, it does not mean that by expanding their knowledge, they gain more power
to affect the design processes and their outcomes. On the contrary, the traditional
context of women’s magazines from which BEME.com originated only further
perpetuated the historically established hierarchy between users, designers, and
clients. Therefore, a study of the design process and the underlying factors offers
ways of understanding how knowledge could be seen as both promoting and
limiting innovation. In the case of BEME.com, knowledge served to maintain the
gendered status quo. However, it had another potential not greatly explored by the
early Web designers: interactivity. Burnett and Marshall (2003) argue that online
interactivity encourages users to engage in a different kind of literacy encompassing
simultaneous reception and production. Such an understanding will have a profound
impact on the role Web designers will play in constructing online experiences in the
future. As Cameron (1998) aptly pointed out, interactivity within the context of the
WWW offers experiences “in potential” (in Julier, 2000, p. 179) that are replacing
a sequential narrative offered by other types of communication media. Hence, Web
designers have to focus on consciously generating ”what-if” experiences, allowing
online users to formulate their own outcomes. Under such circumstances, historical
and traditional assumptions will not necessarily be in a position of power to dominate
or determine the interactive process. The combination of simultaneous reception and
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