Building a friendlier and faster age gate

We all know age gates. For those who are not familiar with it, they are also known as “Adult Verification Systems’’ these are computing systems used by websites to confirm that users attempting to access their website are legally adults.

By law, alcohol-related websites must have an Adult Verification System where users must prove his or her age with their full birth date: year, month and day.

This can be a pain point in the user’s journey, because of the time the user need to invest before accessing the website.

Typically, ages gates are not mobile friendly. Searching for a year value in a drop-down or writing it down is time-consuming and in many cases, frustrating.

As designers, we can’t change the law, but we can provide a better experience by making the “Age Gate” friendlier and faster.

After many hours of research, some paper wireframes, low fidelity prototypes, very constructive feedback and some refining, I built the following solution:

First, I remove all visual distractions from the users, so they only see what they need to. Otherwise, if the content won’t be used, it is hidden.

I arranged years on groups of 12 items: The first group of years shown is the 92% of the traffic on the site of this particular client. Any other user won’t swipe more than 1 time to find his date of birth. Then the user proceeds to find his or her month and year in a very familiar calendar-organized layout.

I built a prototype in framer to validate my hypothesis in decreasing the time users takes to input their age by using this solution and the results were very satisfying:

Desktop:
Conventional Drop Down: 12.4s
User Fill Form: 7.4s
New better Age Gate: 5.9s

Mobile:
Conventional Drop Down: 16.1s
User Fill Form: 12.3
New better Age Gate: 5.4s

The simple fact that a feature has been around for decades does not mean that can’t be improved. I learned from this simple exercise that user experience, in essence, is the constant improvement of design.

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