I find myself looking at rum brands and how they find solutions to presenting products on their websites and digital design approaches. One particular solution I’ve seen is Wray & Nephew’s legal drinking age form validation. This is a very brief case study of Wray & Nephew’s legal drinking age form validation.
Most websites will present a simple year box, this solves the problem for single market brands, but it isn’t suitable for global brands. With Wray & Nephew, their approach to age verification goes a lot deeper. The legal age changes dynamically depending on the region selected.
My example assumes the user lives in the UK and is born on 15 July 2006, making them of legal drinking age (18). I also tested with a year you’d definitely be 18, 2005 and a date you wouldn’t be 18, 16 July 2006. All dates were selected based on this articles publish date. Obviously when an illegal driving age year is inserted, you cannot proceed.
Test One: User is of drinking age (18)
Typing in the year of brith of 2005 for this example instantly present you with an ENTER button and display no validation. This is the behaviour you expect for a validation of this type.
Test Two: User has a questionable drinking age of 18
Typing in the questionable drinking age year of 2006 starts the conditional logic for the form. When 2006 is typed, the user is presented with a further MONTH field. When a month for an illegal drinking age is inserted, e.g. August, then the user is presented with an “Invalid Age” verification.
When a month for a legal drinking age is inserted, e.g. July, then the user is presented with one final field to complete, the day field. If the month isn’t questionable, e.g January to June, then the user can click ENTER and proceed into the website.
When a day for an illegal drinking age is inserted, e.g. 16, then the user is presented with an “Invalid Age” verification.
Finally, when a day for a legal drinking age is inserted, e.g 15, then the user is presented with the ability to click through to the website.
Final word and thoughts for this article
Out of all the websites I have looked at, I’ve never seen a legal drinking age form validation used in such a way. Although this creates a lot of additional friction for a user, therefore slowing the progress from interaction to checkout, I feel that this is a move in the right direction for business responsibility.
There is definitely a long way to go to make a solution that is usable for users and is frictionless. I don’t feel the right move is to introduce an ID upload system, an already proposed system. This creates a bunch of issues regards to data security; who has access to that data, will it be shared/sold, is it actually stored securely?