Vuse Age Gate and Registration
When Vuse was granted a marketing order by the FDA the order required that age and identity be verified before any consumer could enter the site, necessitating the need for and an age gate to be stood up quickly. Additionally, the contents of the age gate could not be interpreted as marketing. A preliminary gate was designed and deployed as a hot fix within two weeks of the order. As expected, bounce rate skyrocketed, and sales tanked. Working closely with our legal team, I lead my team through discovery, research, and testing to implement a strategy to reduce bounce and increase successful age and identity verification. The result was a cohesive approach that increased successful registrations and logins by as sustained ten percent.
Gate Priorities
All traffic to the site must go through the age gate, and can be grouped into two general buckets:
Registration priority, for users visiting via organic or direct with no cookie set.
Login priority, for previous visitors with cookies or traffic coming from email.
Registration Priority
Through user testing we realized that the classical wisdom of providing the primary action first and above the fold did not apply here. Since users are being asked to provide PII and go through a verification process before seeing any of the site’s contents, they’re less inclined to complete the desired action if it’s the first thing they see. By identifying the value propositions that resonate the most with consumers and providing them in a clear and interactive format, they were more persuaded to proceed to and complete verification, despite the primary interaction being below the fold on most mobile devices.
Login Priority
For users where a cookie has been set or the the referring URL has the appropriate UTM parameter, we welcome them with brand centric messaging and instant access to an autofill optimized login experience.
Age and Identity Verification
Through heuristic evaluation and user testing, we optimized the rest of the registration flow. A few highlights are:
Autofill optimization
Communicating how the users information is used to make them feel more comfortable with the process
Password creation optimization
Reduction in number of steps by collecting information passively later in the consumer journey