— Improving Age Visibility.
- Being a responsible gambling operator.
- Behavioural insight and research.
- Squad ideation and iterative design.
- Client
- Sky Betting & Gaming
01/ Summary
- — Services
- Behavioural insight
- Iterative design
- Remote user testing
- Workshop facilitation
- User-interface design
- Wireframing
- Developer collaboration
- — Deliverables
- 5 design iterations
- A measured improved interface
- A more responsible design
- User-interface designs
- User testing report
- — Outcomes
Took a registration process with an age restriction step from 45% of users being able to recall that age restriction to 80%.
Using a combination of behavioural insight, remote user testing, and group ideation sessions.
02/ Understanding the problem
The Compliance Team
Initially, I received a brief from the compliance team to make the 18+ logo larger, as they were concerned people weren’t seeing it. The concerns stemmed from the number of people trying to register who were under 18. They wanted to discourage this and that was their solution. At the time the 18+ logo only existed in the footer of the registration page.
Designing the study
To be able to measure any improvement I first needed a benchmark. I would need to understand how many users can recall the signup age of the current design. I wanted to avoid the user being biased by any branding so would need a white-labelled registration process. I also wanted to control variables as much as possible so would design the white-labelled registration to be as close to the real version as possible; thinking about spacing, colour, font sizes, etc...
Avoiding guesses
As 18 is a common age for age restriction I wanted to avoid using this as the age on any design solutions. I used random ages for each design to control for people guessing “18” when they weren’t sure of the answer.
White labelling the prototype
To avoid users recognising the brand I white-labelled the prototype. All elements were the same size, position and of a similar colour.
03/ The solution
Ideating as a squad
After taking time to design the study and agree on the direction with compliance and stakeholders it was time to begin ideating.
Working with the squad I ran a session to explore potential ways to improve age visibility. We theorised about why users weren’t seeing it at the moment, and from there began to sketch ways to make it more obvious. 4 designs were generated out of the back of the group design session.
Testing with real users
Each one of these designs was tested with at least 20 users. We asked them to signup for the product, and only at the end asked them what age they think they’d need to be. We didn't prime them at the start of the test that we were focussing on age, to try and avoid leading them to look for the age restriction.
4 different concepts
The designs created all focussed on different elements.
Design 1
Theory
By positioning the logo higher up the screen and by making it larger more users will see it. Using a white background will set it out from the other elements. The more information allows users to tap in and expand more detail on why we are asking for this.
Results of age recall
➕ 22% increase
Design 2
Theory
Pulling out the reason for asking for age would create a larger paragraph, and would, therefore, be more likely to be seen. Similar to Design 1 in terms of using a large icon and the colour red.
Results of age recall
➕ 22% increase
Design 3
Theory
Using the word "Age" first puts the idea front and centre of the user's mind. The colour red makes this message feel important, and the position of the message being next to the field hopefully makes it hard to miss.
Results of age recall
➕ 66% increase
Design 4
Theory
Having the message next to the field means the user is more likely to see it than being lower down the screen. The message is in blue which may make it feel more informative than an alert.
Results of age recall
➕ 33% increase
Successful testing, but room for improvement
The recall rates were, as shown above, an improvement across the board, albeit some were minor. I felt we could potentially do better than this by taking learnings from the over 100 user sessions and create a 5th design to test. We’d learnt that having the age restriction notice close to the input field, and mentioning the word “age” first increased recall and recognition of the age restriction. The colour and size were of secondary importance. Many comments also focussed around why we would be needing to ask their age, so our 5th design also gave a clear reason.
One final iteration
Taking the learnings from the previous 4 designs, I created a 5th design to test.
✅ +78% increase on age recall
04/ Outcomes
The testing for the 5th design yielded an 80% recall rate, meaning that when asking users at the end of the registration how old they needed to be, 4/5 could tell us with confidence. Comparing this to the original 45% recall rate of the control design meant we’d improved age visibility dramatically, and could be happy to say we were on our way to becoming a more responsible gambling operator.
The design for this case study can still be seen across all of the registration journeys for Sky Betting & Gaming’s products, such as Sky Bet, Sky Vegas, Sky Casino and Soccer Saturday Super 6.
To test the designs with users I created 6 white-labelled prototypes showing a registration process.
I created a report detailing user comments, percentage increase per design, and also the detail of how each participant performed. This was circulated to the wider team and stakeholders. The squad team were able to read this report for extra detail, and could even watch the user testing session videos back for ultimate context.
It isn't enough to hand-over a static design. I worked closely with the developers to ensure the interaction with this design was perfect. Together we created a subtle animation to show the user they've either typed in an acceptable date of birth or one that was too young.
I'm never under any illusions that the best ideas come from myself. Getting all of our heads together as a squad to understand the problem and create solutions meant we were finding inspired ideas from all areas of our collective experience.
05/ More Case Studies
Available from January 2027
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