Hot answers tagged formatting
43
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 ...
33
Do not update what users enter when they're still typing. It fuddles up their ability to edit as they type, and it makes the field a moving target. If you were to type 25000 straight, no typo's, no backspacing, it might make sense to format it right when you're done. However, what happens when you enter a 0 between the 2 and the 5? Or when you hit backspace?
...
19
Wikipedia is, I suppose, the ultimate in hyperlink use and has quite a strict linking style guideline for the ways in which URLs and hyperlinks are used within the text. Editors who don't conform to the style are quickly picked up - especially on more popular articles.
I have to say it really does make for a pretty consistent reading experience from one ...
17
I vote A. I read the result/s initially as result per second.
Result(s) seems more natural, but I would prefer the option were you'd detect if the number is larger than 1 and change result to results.
Maybe take a look here: english.stackexchange here the (s) seems to be the standard.
Another option is to put it like this:
Matching results: 1
With ...
14
In my opinion, relative dates are incredibly helpful (when used correctly). A relative date, such as yesterday, two days ago, last week provides you with more information than 8/9/2011, 8/8/2011, or 8/2/2011. It not only gives you when something happened, but it tells you when something happened in my current context of now.
I have done some design work ...
14
Firstly, the thousands separator is not common among all regions of the world. When in doubt the recommended solution (SI/ISO 31-0 standard) is to use a non-breakable thin space as a separator.
You also have to take into account that not all countries group by thousands. From Wikipedia:
In China, comma and space are used to mark digit groups ...
13
Ideally you'd let them type in the phone number in any format and you'd have client and server side logic that could parse it out.
Barring that--if you're just looking for a quick fix--look at using field masking. If you're using jQuery, this is a decent one:
http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin/#demo
13
Good question...
I don't think you ever will be able to get it right, so it's better leave this responsibility to the user.
You can trim spaces, of course, but you shouldn't mess with the case.
The only foolproof formatting you could do, is to make everything uppercase.
This might be handy for internal use, but not as a correction of the user's entry.
...
10
We had the same question and after a lot of heated discussion we decided to not format while the user was editing.
While the user type he can add grouping or decimal separators if he would like and as soon as he blurs we add them if the user didn't.
so the user can type
100000
100,000
100,000.00
100000.00
but as soon as he blurs we format it as
...
9
Your linked article is talking about the relationshiop between labels and input fields. The use case is in there is read, think, type. Input, process, output. And during output (typing) a user may want to revisit reading and label-on-top-of-input facilitates that.
The use case of the information you are presenting is read, read. Or maybe simply read. ...
8
There are a couple possible reasons:
Security - Parsing BBCode and turning it into HTML can often be easier than trying to sanitize and secure the HTML. The security risk of missing a vulnerability can be high.
Ease of Use - Some formatting languages, like Markdown, are less verbose than HTML. That said, Markdown is also less descriptive than HTML, so ...
8
From the author's point of view, text links are better. They encode the association between the URL and the text.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext">Hypertext</a> is cool.
(Of course, authors don't need to worry about the intricacies of HTML. The above code can be produced through a WYSIWYG editor, Markdown, etc.)
How to ...
7
If you are asking this question for a pixel perfect mockup, you can skip the following paragraph. Otherwise, you MUST read it:
Except for pixel-perfect mockups, you should not create images for your textual buttons to use in production, especially given the power of CSS for web or styling for desktop/mobile/any other target platform. Because it would make ...
7
Back to the question where the answer is yes, it improves readability, at least if you listen to Jakob Nielsen who (yet again) wrote an article on 113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability where #112 says:
112) Use a thousands separator appropriate to your locale for numbers that have five or more digits. For example, in the United States, fifty-three ...
7
Look at how times are shown in other stopwatch applications as an indication, as they have been refined over years. The typical way that it is shown is simply as HH:MM:SS.
If you're only looking for time to an accuracy of seconds and you want more than just numbers, then something like 2h 23m 12s seems clear enough without taking up lots of space. You ...
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
For the most part it is a design issue. But in general I would use a table when there is a lot of information present, and simple text when there is little information presented.
When you present in text, however, you should pay attention to the formatting so that it is quick and easy to tell the label apart from the data. In general I would also keep the ...
7
Don't mix your counting systems.
If you are dealing with a technical audience who are happy counting from zero, then you need to do that consistently. If you have 72 items, and are starting at zero, your message should read something like:
Item 16 of 71 (maximum 5000), last modified one hour ago
Note that it is of 71 and 72.
If you are going to start ...
7
If you are using English, then the most common way is option A. 100 matching result(s).
However I would strongly discourage using this, as it makes it very difficult to internationalise your application. I would suggest finding a way of wording it that does not require a reference to a singular or plural noun. I would rather use:
Matching results: ...
6
The question you need to ask is:
Will enabling pasting of rich text add value to my application?
Will it add more users? Will it help retain users? Will it make them more productive? etc.
If the answer is "yes" then you need to weigh that against the cost - which in this case is the effort required to sanitise the input and the cost of not sanitising ...
6
Short Answer:
ITU-T E.123 (PDF) will give you an idea of how to format international numbers
Libphonenumber from Google will actually do the formatting for you (demo here)
Slightly longer answer:
Ideally, phone numbers should be displayed in a format easily readable by humans and recognizable as a phone number by devices. Further, the number should ...
6
The question actually has two aspects:
Use two different highlighting styles for different words (resulting in three types of writing: normal, bold and italic)
Double highlight which allows highlighting parts of highlighted words (resulting in four different types of writing: normal, bold, italic, bolditalic)
A biology student's flashcard for "Daisy" ...
6
It is a mistake. They should have used a non-breaking space between 'user' and 'experience'. In HTML it is represented as   or .
I also looked at that and saw "user", and if it weren't for your red arrow, I wouldn't have seen the "experience" part of that, which is clearly not their intention.
6
Note that in some cases it would be even better to leave out the labels entirely...
In your example it can look something like this:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
Using less wording in your designs will always make the more clear and easy to scan.
Images (in the right amount) that will represent repetitive ...
5
To what accuracy do you need to know what time an entry was posted?
To the second? Maybe if it was posted less than a minute ago.
To the minute? Maybe if it was posted less than 10 hours ago. Why not if less than 1 hour - because comparing times between something 59 minutes old and something 89 minutes old and having the second one approximate it to 1 ...
5
I don't have any newer research to point to in this answer, but I believe that the question of how much is too much is not objectively answerable. Following is my subjective opinion.
It depends on the situation; the audience; and the context. The rest of my answer is specific to reading on the web.
People will generally scan to see if an article looks ...
5
First of all, you need to be consistent. You can't show the currency code for some currencies but not for others, just because they don't have a unique symbol. You also can't rely on all your users knowing the symbols.
Regarding the format - maybe I'm misinterpreting your question, but it seems like you want to present each currency in the format customary ...
4
I would assume your users would choose the date format based on the short format most common in their region.
Therefore you should pick the long format that is commonly used in the same regions where the short format is popular.
UK:
dd/mm/yyyy -> Tues 7th Dec 1941
US:
mm/dd/yyyy -> Dec 7 Tues, 1941
??:
yyyy-mm-dd -> 1941 Dec 7th Tues
I'm not an exert ...
4
For the second version I'd use E MMM dd yyyy. This will produce 'Tue Jan 11 2011'.
I'd be tempted to leave the last format alone. One of the reasons for choosing Year/Month/Day format is to ease in the sorting of data by date. Adding the day name at the front of this and changing the month number to a name will break that sorting ability.
If you need to ...
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