Maybe it assumes that I’m butch

Or “Why are Daily Mile‘s default avatars male?”

This is a pretty common — and I would guess, frequently wrong — assumption on the part of web site user interface designers. No, your users won’t all be male. Yes, many women and genderqueer people will be annoyed that you made such an assumption. No, “But we let people upload their own photo!” isn’t a defense.

It’s simple enough to use a gender-neutral avatar. Friendfeed uses a hand-drawn smiley face. Other sites use patterned avatars. You could even go the Mac OS X route and use clip art, chosen at random.

Design has an impact on your brand and the kind of community you wish to foster. Seeing a masculine avatar suggests to me that DailyMile.com — or at least the DailyMile.com team — is very a guy-centric, potentially macho place, with a blind spot around gender issues. That’s not such a favorable impression for a brand, and it’s not necessarily a community that I want to invest or take part in.

Worse still, there isn’t a way to change it — other than to upload a photo. (It doesn’t have to be of *you,* but a 4K one color JPG won’t work. A bourbon Manhattan photo, however, will . ) At the very least, give users an option.