Hot answers tagged dates
60
I don't have a pointer to published research - but in my experience US folk will always assume the US MM/DD/YYYY format unless they are knowingly using an non-US site, and are already aware of the potential differences.
If you have to use numbers only then the format that causes least confusion across cultures in my experience is YYYY-MM-DD since it ...
12
What is the context of your application? Context really matters for dates. Consider the two following situations.
A budgeting application where users plan spending for future years
A college reunion signup where users enter their graduation date
Clearly if people are planning, they would be annoyed to get a date in the past and if people are entering ...
11
As long as it truly is within a single year, a range slider seems appropriate here.
via Kevin Anderson on Dribbble
EDIT:
The date range picker on the google finance site solves the problem with my previous answer. This example doesn't "snap" to month increments, but a different implementation certainly could.
11
If a range of months could span across the year end, perhaps a circular dial makes more sense.
Since you have limited vertical space it would have to be a dropdown though.
Something like this perhaps:
10
If you are asking for data that usually follows a particular format, then ask for it in that format. Visually people are used to months shown in a calendar, so show it in a calendar, and let them select the months that they want.
Visually it is very easy for someone to see whether they have the months that they want like that. Here is a quick example of ...
10
Try doing a google search on calendar icon and then you capture the results (if worth it). Just by skimming the results I saw that 9 was a popular number, but not far from others.
From the Semiotics perspective 31 might work, as people easily identify it as the maximum number of days a month can get, and design-wise is filling.
I think that only having the ...
9
Your question assumes that
a) date pickers (they aren't called spinners) aren't appropriate everywhere,
b) date pickers can't be modified,
and c) the design guidelines must be followed to the tee.
Thus, I think the proper answer would be a review of SDK manuals & UX guidelines not in any kind of research.
First of all, guidelines are called that way ...
7
Your proposed solution also introduces a jump. If it's 20 June 2013, and I see a post dated “22 June”, I'm going to think “June this year”, and then do a double take because that's still into the future. When it's June 2013, all posts from June 2012 should be marked “June '12”. As the end of the month approaches, it may be good to mark posts from July as ...
7
A lot depends on what you are trying to time, how accurate it needs to be, and who your audience is.
If you were timing an olympic event, you would at most need hours, but you may need thousandths of a second. But if you were timing how long it took to build a house, you would most likely need it to count into years at maximum and your maximum resolution ...
7
If you want to refer to a point in time, you need to either give the time, or give a relative time. So that translates to either something like 11:32 today or 5 hours ago. Simply stating "5 hours" tells you nothing really as it is a measurement of a duration of time and nothing more without a reference point. So don't use this.
When people use forums and ...
6
It is always advisable to have a more intuitive design to let the user know when the button gets enabled and disabled. In your case if you say every 30 days the button will get enabled then let it be displayed and have small text inside the button which is dynamic to say "DAYS LEFT". It takes out the burden from the user to calculate the days by them self ...
5
Perhaps you could consider a design where you have a bar-chart of prices over your period. I have seen a design like that on airline sites, and I liked it a lot. Horizontally, you'd set your arrival dates, and vertically the price. You'd start with a standard-length stay, that the user might customize. I am not sure if showing a single night would make most ...
5
I think if you are selecting a single range within a single year you can keep it super simple (and easy to use) with a pair of select boxes.
Advantages:
Minimal Vertical Space
Easy to select the month (the user can just tab and type the first letter of the month)
Minimal development cost
Easy to add helpers (e.g. hints that show number of months ...
4
Include the year once nine months have passed.
You don't want to include the year when it's inferred, as it's generally a bad idea to increase noise without an increase in signal, particularly when that noise takes a datestamp above the ten-character scale of a single fovea fixation. That reduces scan-ability, which might be a detriment in certain usecases.
...
4
As Stephen already said: the purpose of the entered date matters a lot.
I recently developed a date entry widget that also does this (and more). It allows entering the dates in basically any format. When it recognizes the entered data as a date, it shows a passive popup under the widget with the possible matching dates for the entered text. The ordering ...
4
Just stumbled across this on linkedin. Linkedin uses a simple toggle link to change between range and single date.
You have a standard single date picker by default:
and you can toggle that to enter a range:
In your case, if the user wants to avoid month, they can leave the month dropdown empty (have the first option as null) and just select the year.
4
You would have to test with your audience, but I would opt for symbols where they are clear to most people. For anything numerical, X > Y is clear. I can't speak for all cultures, but I covered this in grade 4 at school, so I would assume the majority of people have at least this level of mathematical understanding.
I would also opt to do the same for ...
3
In the case of the SE example, I don't see a huge problem with this. It's not like it's telling you the post was made "a year ago" vs. just a few days ago.
As long as you're leaving the date/time on a post rather than insisting it's just 'a year ago", 90% of folks will be smart enough to figure out it's recent, and the remaining 10% don't care.
If you ...
3
You really shouldn't have to make your users think too much. It may be obvious now, but in the middle of the year (say, April), will it really be obvious that "March" means "a month ago" and "May" means "a year ago"? Even worse, what if it is April 15 and you see "April 16th"? (this can be avoided by doing it month-wise, though) It's even more confusing, ...
3
An interface like Google Calendar's Week View should be good for your task (I don't think you will need all the functionality, but only an idea of how things may look like), user will be able to scroll through the dates (and months) and add event reminders for the certain time. You may also add a list of planned events to help user to overview all of the ...
3
I would take the website view.
Looking at it from the final day, letting me know I have 1 day remaining would indicate 24 hours left (which would only be the case @ midnight on Thursday). If I then come back tomorrow, and find my subscription has expired, I would be annoyed.
If the response could be tailored to show number of hours on the final day, then I ...
3
Rounding - you should apply the same rules you would to a floating point number so "1 hour 24 minutes" is less than 1.5 hours so it should be rounded down to "1 hour". When you pass 30 minutes then round up.
I'd go with "Yesterday", "2 days ago" etc.
A quick check on Stack Exchange shows that they use "Yesterday", "2 days ago", localised date, while (as you ...
3
This is the solution I have come up with so far.
Date range when displayed inline:
Date range when displayed across lines:
If there are no better suggestions I will eventually mark this as the accepted answer
3
Firstly, don't use two character years. We finished with the Y2K horrors, so please let's learn from them.
Then, assuming there is some critical reason to use two character years: If your users aren't entering future dates, or if those future dates are bound to something near the current date (say a few years in the future), then you should not use the ...
3
A series of dropdowns or comboboxes could work well, allowing the user to specify the date at whatever level of granularity she wants.
Initially just show:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
If the user elects to choose a year, you can then show an additional dropdown for a month, as well as revealing an option to ...
2
Hmmm. If I understand your question, you want the solution to be as flexible as possible as well - to be able to select multiple consecutive days as easily as a few hours (or even minutes). In broad terms, I'm thinking:
Zoom and pan to get the broad timeframe (e.g. zoom out to get years, pan across to select 2015, zoom in to select the first week in ...
2
Interesting web application. Something you might want to look into is Adam Shaw's Full Calander jQuery plugin. I have used it for a while and it is quite extendable. So far from what my company developers have seen and used, they are pretty impressive. It has an extension for Google Calendar and it also we have also got it hooked up to Microsoft Exchange ...
2
It's better to ask yourself what ways people think of dates, and model a solution on that. Personally, I think a text input field with a date picker is a great solution as I have yet to find anyone that doesn't understand that or who has trouble using that.
Granted there is variation in the quality of date pickers, but that is another question.
When in ...
2
What kind of date input/widget you choose greatly depends on the information the user needs to input. In most cases, the user may not know the exact date, so leaving out the calendar forces them to take an additional step of finding their own calendar to look up the date, so this becomes slower and less usable. For example, if they are setting up an ...
2
The moment you state a date instead of an elapsed time (where 48 hours do really seem to provide a good boundary), the year should be mentioned. Why? Just imagine in the dark distant future a mirror that didn't know about your smart-date-adjuster(TM) becomes the only available source, with no information on the actual crawling date.
How should a visitor now ...
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