Gender choices

[Cynthia Goode]

I have just signed up on Kitely for the first time and was disappointed to find that there are only two gender options for avatar creation: male and female.

Please consider offering a non-gender specific option for people who do not specifically identify as either male or female. People are more varied than you may realize and it is rude to exclude them or force them into specific boxes that don't fit.

Thanks!

[Dot Matrix]

Hello Cynthia. Welcome to Kitely.

Have you tried visiting Avatari, say, which includes a far bigger range of avatars than is possible on Kitely Welcome Center or in Kitely Setup?

Another option is the Avatar Appearance section of Kitely Market which offers various avatar types and genders.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Cynthia,

The new account creation dialog was created years ago and the options we provided for Avatar Gender matched the free avatar options that we had at the time (which were very limited). They would have more appropriately been called Avatar Sex (or morphology) and even using that label they would have hardly covered the real world varieties that exist. The starter avatar options we provide today have more racial variety but are still very limited.

This option is only used to select a random starter avatar for your first login. Due to the fact that it often doesn't match how people wish to identify, the first thing people who sign up do is look for an avatar that better matches how they wish to present themselves inworld (in terms of gender, race, body type, and more).

This user experience in our consumer offering is far from ideal and I totally agree that forcing you to choose between options that don't include your identity doesn't convey a positive first impression. In our Organization offering we don't ask people for their gender and instead let them choose between the various starter avatar options approved by their organization. See: https://kitely.atlassian.net/wiki/space ... rs+Library Unfortunately, we don't offer that functionality in our consumer offering yet.

[Cynthia Goode]

Thank you Ilan for the explanation. I will hope that at some point Kitely will modify the sign up form to indicate that there are gender neutral options. As you say, it does not provide a positive first impression, which is why I wanted to point it out. The first impression on signing up is that there are no options except the two listed, and there is no indication that users will be able to modify their avatars as desired. Again, thanks for explaining, and I hope changes will be made in future.