Date of birth
I really like the simplicity of this one, as it illustrates how much I sometimes need to pour over the words to come up with just the right solution.
Some overseas students do not have access to their full date of birth. It is quite common to only have the year of birth. For this section, we have the fields to put in day, month and year of birth. Only the year field is mandatory. So we need to encourage users to enter their full date of birth, or if they cannot, explain how to continue.
After
Analysis
This was an interesting case, as while the full date of birth helps us match a user to their account, it was a point that stopped a lot of overseas students.
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In this case, I went through a lot of variants to get to a place where both sets of users were covered.
"Only the year is mandatory": This risks users with full dates of birth not completing all the fields.
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Then I narrowed it down with:
1. "If you can only give us your year of birth, enter it in the year field"
2. "If you only have your year of birth, you can just complete the year field"
3. "If you only have your year of birth, leave the day and month fields blank, and just enter the year"
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I eventually settled on this version. Which I think is the cleanest, covers both sets of users, and has clear instructions in both cases.
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I'd like to revisit this again in the future. Hint text should ideally be one sentence, with no full stops. It's also why this version does not end with one, although there's one in the middle.​
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I had a lot of conversations with stakeholders while we worked out the solution to this one, as we were quite limited in deadline and technical restrictions.
While I think it works well for our current situation, it is a compromise on the ideal GDS pattern. So, I'd like to see if we could address this in any other way. We might be able to alter the user flow to personalise the journey even more.
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