Designer Fashion meets Digital Cannabis Sales
Tokyo Smoke
Designing for Brand, Education, and Security
“Higher Learning”
We began by researching Tokyo Smoke’s customer base and identifying new potential customers. We combined Tokyo Smoke’s brand identify of being trendy, youthful, and design-driven with a UX layout that prioritized learning and education around cannabis consumption.
What is a Hard Age Gate and why did we need one?
Just because the requirements are complex doesn’t mean that the user experience should be.
When building an eCommerce website you have to prioritize minimizing barriers to entry by ensuring a smooth user journey that always leads to conversion. But what happens when government regulations around a controlled substance like cannabis requires that you put up numerous hoops for your customers to jump through before they checkout?
We were required to build a Hard Age Gate, which is an identify-verification layer between the user and payment capture. No existing software existed that we could easily integrate with, and as a consequence we had to build out the user experience as well as an integration between Shopify and Equifax from scratch. This allowed us to safely and securely verify and confirm the user’s ID before finalizing the transaction, while minimizing customer drop-off.
This document that I created highlights each step along the user journey, as well as identifies the technical requirements needed at each step, accounting for all of the acceptable outcomes both from a back end, and front end point of view.
Following Regulations
We introduce the concept of age gating early in the user journey, normalizing the idea that this is a 19+ website through a ‘Soft Age Gate’ that asks for the user’s date of birth in order to proceed.
The user is also asked to provide enough personal information needed to conduct an actual identify check via the ‘Hard Age Gate’ at checkout. This was a requirement by the province of Manitoba.
Transparency & Trust
In order to ensure a smooth user experience, we made it a point to over-communicate with the user to ensure that they understand what a hard age gate check is, how it works, and why it’s necessary.
Firm but Fair
We provided the user with several opportunities to retry in case their age gate failed.We also designed ‘next steps’ in case they used up all of their attempts at verifying their age.
