Raj Rao – Date of Birth

TEAM

Nextdoor – Growth Team

ROLE

Senior Product Designer

DELIVERABLE

iOS, Android, Web, mWeb

SUMMARY

Designed the process to collect date of birth for advertising and legal purposes.

Overview + Goals

With GDPR’s enforcement for minimum age of consent looming, Nextdoor looked to find the best way to collect date of birth data. Since Nextdoor operates internationally, the growth team had to carefully collect this sensitive data according to varying legality per region. I worked closely alongside a Product Manager and our Product Legal Counsel to launch this to market.

User Research

Prior to putting together designs, I consulted our user research team for how our users felt about collecting sensitive personal information.

Insights from our onboarding flow showed users did not always feel comfortable giving out personal information like their actual name or address without knowing specifically why it was needed and how that information might be used on the platform. This was kept strongly in mind while coming up with the designs.

Prior to putting together designs, I consulted our user research team for how our users felt about collecting sensitive personal information.

We had lots of evidence from our onboarding flow that users did not always feel comfortable giving out information like their actual name or address without knowing specifically why it was needed and how that information might be used on the platform or by Nextdoor. This was kept strongly in mind while coming up with the designs.

“Enter my address? That is too much information off the bat to ask someone. Your address is personal, you don’t want people to pop up at your house.

Research participant

Design

In order to choose the best design for our date of birth form fields, I double checked best practices for date of birth collection and found an in-depth case study. Packed with user feedback and experiments, it concluded that a manual entry form was the most accurate and had the least amount of friction for users. Using our Blocks design system, I followed appropriate design patterns for both new and returning users.

This design would appear in two places: 1) for new users in our onboarding flow and 2) for existing users upon opening the app or completing login. For the existing design, we are allowing unlimited skips until it gets closer for a particular region requiring DoB collection.

In order to choose the best design for our date of birth form fields, I double checked best practices for date of birth collection and found an in-depth case study. Packed with user feedback and experiments, it concluded that a manual entry form was the most accurate and had the least amount of friction for users. Using our Blocks design system, I followed appropriate design patterns for both new and returning users.

This design would appear in two places: 1) for new users in our onboarding flow and 2) for existing users upon opening the app or completing login. For the existing design, we are allowing unlimited skips until it gets closer for a particular region requiring DoB collection.

Regional Differences

Based on the recommendations of our Product Legal Counsel, we planned to roll out date of birth (DoB) collection with unique copy based on each region. Copy changed depending on if a region required a minimum age to use social media / the internet or if it’s legal to collect users’ age for advertising purposes.

Error States

While an expected part of any project, the error handling proved to be quite unique considering the data for DoB entered is all linked to one another.

You could expect a form field for month to reject a value over 12 before submitting but due to technical constraints and the complexity of DoB data, we decided as a team to make all of our error handling on submit. It was challenging but ultimately satisfying working through this complex technical discussion with my engineers to find a solution.

While an expected part of any project, the error handling proved to be quite unique considering the data for DoB entered is all linked to one another.

You could expect a form field for month to reject a value over 12 before submitting but due to technical constraints and the complexity of DoB data, we decided as a team to make all of our error handling on submit. It was challenging but ultimately satisfying working through this complex technical discussion with my engineers to find a solution.

Data Analysis

Our first experiment to show this design was once existing users had started their session and our team expected engagement to go down but were pleasantly surprised to find that there was a slight boost in engagement in the month following this rollout. Following experiments were to measure how including DoB in the onboarding flow affected metrics for the rest of the flow.

Retrospective + Next Steps

Since this project was created around looming GDPR regulations and legality around minimum age for using the internet, the goals and benchmarks of the project were atypical to most other growth projects. Our goal was to ensure the mechanism to collect DoB was functioning and did not hurt metrics too badly and in that, we succeeded.

In a more ideal timeline, we would have had time to conduct user testing to get an idea how our existing or potential users felt about this design.

Next steps would be to continue monitoring the metric performance of this design for existing users as well as how it performs in onboarding for new users. Adding a way for users to view the DoB they entered in Profile would be a welcome addition as well.