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Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

Experienced UX practitioners will immediately note that a surprisingly large proportion of users don't actually know how old they are; furthermore, of those that do, another significant segment will (intentionally or otherwise) mis-state their age, date of birth etc.

This problem is further exacerbated by the wide variety of temporal arithmetic possibilities any such workflow might adopt.

The solution is to either combine the forms, or (in an interactive context) ask the user if they were born before 1960, then give them the right form.

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> a surprisingly large proportion of users don't actually know how old they are

How did they manage this? I've tried every way I can think of forgetting my age, to no avail -the bastard number is always there :)

I'm in my late twenties and sometimes I need to pause, a bit like dealing with left/right or east/west.

I may forget my age, but I can't forget I'm now over 30.

I'm in my twenties. Sometimes I forget my age. Only ever by one year -- I just don't remember if my birthday passed or not. Kind of like in January when write oit today's date and accidentally use the previous year. After a few mistakes, your brain adjusts and you start using the right one. Same thing for my age, except that I don't actually think about my age very often; it hasn't mattered much since I passed 21.

A colleague of a old friend would recall your birth year (and date?) to know your age. It is a value about you that doesn’t change and then you can derive the age.

I’ve started doing similar now. I don’t often recall my age or the number of years my wife and I have been married, or, heck, even our kid’s ages. But I recall all the years and dates. In this way, I more easily appear to recall the right value.

I've no idea of my precise age.

Of course. The Uncertainty Principle encodes this consequence: we know exactly how fast we are aging, ergo we cannot know exactly how old we are.

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