"The redesign of our global Age Gateway"
Context
Being a global beverage company specialising in alcoholic beverages, Carlsberg needs to adhere to legal requirements, and I was part of the compliance team. The age gateway is a page where a person must confirm their age before entering a website that sells alcohol. If their age complies with the legal drinking age of the specific country they are in, they are allowed to access the site.
Solution
This was a collaborative effort with the legal team, developers, and Product Owner, where we analysed the legal requirements for each country, technical possibilities, brand managers’ needs, and cultural and religious considerations.
We provided each brand with the option to personalise their Age Gateway in line with their own visual identity while maintaining a consistent layout across all of Carlsberg’s brands.
My role
Senior Produtc Designer.
Time of project
4 months.
The UX Process
Understanding the problem
As the designer responsible for compliance, I conducted a thorough analysis of the products I worked on and identified several issues with Age Gateways across the brands:
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There was a lack of consistency. While each brand has its own visual identity, they all belong to the Carlsberg Group, making it crucial to maintain consistency.
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Many pages had accessibility problems. Since brands had the freedom to design their Age Gateways as they wished, they often used background images that significantly reduced accessibility.
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The process of selecting a country and entering one’s age was overwhelming for users. On top of this, they also had to accept cookies, increasing the risk of losing potential customers at this stage.
Business approval
After gathering this information, I met with my Product Owner to seek business approval for my project. She presented it to the Project Manager, who, after reviewing it, approved the initiative to create a unified page for all of Carlsberg’s brands. The goal was to ensure consistency while meeting legal and accessibility requirements.
The legal
My first step was to thoroughly understand all the legal requirements for an Age Gateway.
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What words are permissible?
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What images can we use?
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Can we simplify the process by using Yes or No buttons instead of requiring users to input their year, month, and day of birth?
Meetings and legal approvals continued throughout the entire process to ensure compliance.
Heuristic Analysis on the previous default page
My goal was to simplify the page and reduce friction. The existing page was cluttered and counterproductive to its purpose.
We had a default Age Gateway page that was the most commonly used. Using this as a reference, I conducted a Heuristic Analysis to identify areas for improvement.
Competitors and similar pages analysis
Before starting my designs, I felt it was important to understand what was most commonly used, following the usability heuristic of Consistency and Standards (adhering to established industry conventions).
Technical constraints... Or not
One of my key goals for this product was to reduce the number of clicks and create a minimalist design. To achieve this, I needed to find a way for the system to automatically recognise the user’s location.
I consulted with the development team to understand the possibility of implementing this feature. After receiving their approval, several questions arose and we needed to comply with the laws of each country, as each had a different legal minimum age for purchasing alcoholic drinks:
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Should we use the country where the user is located or the country where the website is based? (For example, a user in France could be accessing a website in Denmark.)
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What should we do if we cannot recognise the user’s country?
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What is the impact of removing this control and freedom from the user?
Conclusion
After several meetings and discussions, as well as consultations with the legal department and analysis of user behaviour on the website, we reached the following conclusions:
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We will adhere to the law of the country where the user is located, even if they access websites from another country.
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If we cannot recognise the user’s country, we identified the country with the highest minimum age and used that as the default, with a warning for countries where alcohol is not permitted.
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The data analysis showed that users would not be impacted by the removal of the country selection, as fewer than 0.01% of them used this function.
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Brand managers’ requirements
Brand managers often ran campaigns where they typically used images in the background. I was opposed to the use of images in the Age Gateway for the following reasons:
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The Age Gateway was a legal requirement, not a commercial space. Its sole purpose was to ensure that the user was legally allowed to access a page with alcoholic beverages.
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Background images presented significant usability issues, as there was a high chance that the text would not be legible, especially when we had no control over the images they would use.
However, the business decided to retain the option to include an image, so I had to find a way to align the business requirements while maintaining usability.
The UI Process
Study
With all the information I had gathered and all the requirements aligned, I began a study on how the new Age Gateway for the Carlsberg Group would look.
Prototype
This is the final prototype, where I used a minimalist design, respecting all the requirements of the business, legal team, and stakeholders.
Before and After
A comparison between the previous design and the new one.
Hand-off
Design parameters
To make it easier for the developers, I created a document outlining all the design parameters they should follow.
Impact
As of the day I wrote this case, the new Age Gateway had been used by more than a hundred brands across over ninety different countries.
The results were brought high visibility to the compliance area and highly positive feedback.
