Actually thats not why we have the choice upon registration at all. Story time...
When we first soft launched Snapzu as Alpha back in the very early days, we had only one style of avatar that had 50 different designs for 50 different levels and it were created at a substantial cost. This naturally received an outcry of complaints that the site's avatars resembled male features and that if we were to get serious about this concept we would need to create another set of 50 avatars that had feminine features. So as you can see, we were forced to create a 2nd set of avatars that would closely resemble features that many members felt were not being represented. The male or female question has nothing to do with anything but that simple choice of the avatar style, just like if you were to create a character in an online game, ie. WoW, for example.
Being forced to either lie (pretend to be a dude) or be honest (tagged to be a chick) annoys me. I don't want to lie, but I also don't like necessarily being visually identified as female online before people even read what I've said.
It's like wearing a 'kick me' sign.
What about giving the 'mascots' names (if they don't already have them), and having something like 'Choose your mascot: Bob or Sally' (or whatever). Unless it's because you are using the info for analytics, in which case it could be an additional question alongside 'Male / Female / Prefer not to say'. This way you can continue with the binary level avatar approach, but also collect optional gender data for analysis. Just a thought.
If you added an androgynous option today would you have to create another set of 50 avatars? If not that might be an easy way to be more inclusive. Alternatively, could that flow be reworked to let users upload their avatar as an alternative to picking one of the generic avatars? Being honest, it took me a day or so to realize I even could upload an avatar.
This naturally received an outcry of complaints that the site's avatars resembled male features and that if we were to get serious about this concept we would need to create another set of 50 avatars that had feminine features.
Actually thats not why we have the choice upon registration at all. Story time...
When we first soft launched Snapzu as Alpha back in the very early days, we had only one style of avatar that had 50 different designs for 50 different levels and it were created at a substantial cost. This naturally received an outcry of complaints that the site's avatars resembled male features and that if we were to get serious about this concept we would need to create another set of 50 avatars that had feminine features. So as you can see, we were forced to create a 2nd set of avatars that would closely resemble features that many members felt were not being represented. The male or female question has nothing to do with anything but that simple choice of the avatar style, just like if you were to create a character in an online game, ie. WoW, for example.
Oh, huh. Were the avatars expected to play a bigger part in the site?
Why go with gendered avatars at all?
Being forced to either lie (pretend to be a dude) or be honest (tagged to be a chick) annoys me. I don't want to lie, but I also don't like necessarily being visually identified as female online before people even read what I've said. It's like wearing a 'kick me' sign.
What about giving the 'mascots' names (if they don't already have them), and having something like 'Choose your mascot: Bob or Sally' (or whatever). Unless it's because you are using the info for analytics, in which case it could be an additional question alongside 'Male / Female / Prefer not to say'. This way you can continue with the binary level avatar approach, but also collect optional gender data for analysis. Just a thought.
If you added an androgynous option today would you have to create another set of 50 avatars? If not that might be an easy way to be more inclusive. Alternatively, could that flow be reworked to let users upload their avatar as an alternative to picking one of the generic avatars? Being honest, it took me a day or so to realize I even could upload an avatar.
This is in reference to the level avatars, that appear on your profile, not the avatars that appear next to your comments.
Ahha, I hadn't even noticed that was there. When I went through the signup flow it only had the comment avatars shown.
I could write a quick script to take the 50 male and 50 female characters, cut them down the middle and put them together and re save the new set.
Damned if you do, Damned if you don't.