Hot answers tagged time
23
There are many things you can do in such situation. Two obvious things that come to my mind:
Provide some distracting animation (time goes faster when user is distracted, check the Foursquare's animation they've used in their iPhone app).
Show some funny quote, interesting fact or tip that could be if not useful then just entertaining and appropriate in ...
20
Nice. I like your idea of rewarding the good ones much more instead of blaming the bad ones. Don't know what type of company it is but finger pointing feels like from the old days and doesn't support a great work environment.
For the 'Reporting time highscore' you might want to reward those who always report on time but also encourage everybody else to be ...
20
Because the simple system works. You set it when you go to bed, and if you don't want to be woken up the next day, just don't set it.
More complicated ones with more features are available if you like, but the common ones do the job in the simplest most intuitive way. Good UX design.
20
There is some interesting pedantic information on the weirdness of midnight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight
Specifically, technically, at midnight, it's neither am nor pm. But merely the instant of transition between the two.
Some ideas:
Use a 24 hour clock. Perhaps with 12 hour correlations in parenthesis:
...
10
11
12
13 (1pm)
14 (2pm)
etc
...
17
This is a tricky interaction, mostly because it has to be super intuitive since the end users are not computer savy. I know it because I´ve had to deal with it in the past :)
I had the same problem while working in the UX team at 11870.com (a recomendations website similar to Yelp), this is the way we handled it, might not be the ideal solution but it ...
16
I think it can better to make a visual support for such input, that will allow to enter not only breaks, but also days off. Input can look like this:
Clicking on row or cell header (with hour or day) should turn on/off all days or hours. Also you can add popular variants at top of table to select them faster — «24x7», «All days without weekends» etc.
...
13
In short, no. It will not help "to get rid of late time reports".
High scores will NOT motivate anybody at tail of highscore list - they "know" there is no chance to get on top. And if someone wanted to change it, the "price" of better score is not worth the price they get for being late (it means the punishment is too low). Maybe the reason for being at ...
9
Gamification is way better than a wall of shame. Research shows that that punishment does not really work for changing behaviour while encouragement does(See for example "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman).
While the idea of gamification is probably effective(Looking at for example fitocrazy) Tt would probably be more effective trying to address the root ...
9
Preloaders are the best things. There are many kind of preloaders and it helps to let understand users that something is loading and nothing crashed.
Then you can think to entertain users showing a funny or creative preloader.
Take a look here. Are flash based but you can do that using other technologies like jQuery.
8
This paper [1] provide a survey on whishes of users regarding progress bars and alternative activities.
47% of the participants mentioned staying idle for short waiting
period (<5s), while 37% of the participants reported switching to a
temporary activity. However, 65% answered that they switch to other
activities for longer wait (> 15 s). ...
8
We got a page like that in a server admin interface. You can unfortunately not download a demo of it (as it is the server admin interface) but it looks kind of like this:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
One of those bars each for every day of the week. And then a set of presets like "Always", "Never", "Working ...
8
I think the best way for users to input data is through a form - Everyone knows how to use them, and you can easily split lots of data into small, manageable chunks. Here's my solution:
This gives them enough control that they can input anything they need, but doesn't overwhelm them with a barrage of questions.
Clicking on "This schedule only applies to ...
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 ...
6
"Preferred" doesn't mean that 100% of your audience will be comfortable with it. Give the user the choice to change it, that way, everybody is happy.
Using 24h format also decreases ambiguity on time, specially if the clock in your website will be used to make appointments or to handle a schedule.
6
Thought about this a while back for a restaurant related website and Sacha's newsletter problem resurfaced this for me. There are many many different types of opening hours that restaurants can have, so the solution has to be flexible enough to encompass the different variants, yet simple enough that it's not intimidating for restauranteurs (who may not be ...
5
Be careful. Other factors can play into this game. I remember from my time reporting agency days we needed to have the appropriate job or time codes to report against. That relied on someone else in Sales, HR or Administrative to activate/input. It became nearly impossible to have accurate time in at the end of the week if someone further up the chain didn't ...
5
There is another concept I've seen somewhere, I can't remember where but I'll try to dig up a reference. The concept is to define this length of time by their previous actions. i.e. if it is the first time they have dismissed the update tell them again the next time they boot up/log in, however if they have dismissed it multiple times you don't want to keep ...
5
Your stages sound exactly like activities in a project. Visualizing the planning for a project is usually done with a Gantt Chart. A simple one might look like:
The dark part of each bar represents the minimum time an acitivity takes, the transparent part indicates the margin on the duration.
When project activities can depend on each other, for example ...
5
Some ideas.
1) Allow for 'split' hours:
Hours:
[ ] to [ ] (+ split hours)
And if they decide to split:
Hours:
[ ] to [ ]
[ ] to [ ] (+ split hours)
2) Let them free form it as a text area:
Enter your hours of operation:
----------------------------
| |
| |
| ...
4
HTML5 has a type="time" input which in my Chrome Browser presents a spinbox field as below, but which doesn't let me enter seconds - or at least if I do and hit the up/down buttons, the seconds are removed.
However, this relies on the user having to think about the separator (a colon in this case, but periods are also valid in some locales), so if using ...
4
My alarm clock does this, and it's brillant!
I don't buy the "because simple is best" argument in this case, for the reason that the alarm clock I own is simple to use, never wakes me up at the weekend and I never forget to set it on weekdays either—it's already done it for me. A great enhancement.
I can't believe more alarm clocks don't have this feature.
...
4
While I agree that the simple design does work, there is a place, I think, for more advances in the development of alarm clocks, as long as the complexity of setting them is not hugely increased.
I have a Digital Radio alarm clock, and I woudl really like to be able to set different stations for waking me up in the morning and other times - like at night to ...
4
Leaderboards motivate top players only. Realistically, there is only one winner. I personally wouldn't bother work to reach or maintain 2nd or 3rd position.
Few people would feel compelled to collect mundane work related badges.
The following proposal works better with more employees:
I would hold a regular lottery.
Each reporting-on-time employee bumps ...
4
You can do a simple timeline with a histogram to achieve your end-result. The individual boxes are events and the height of the histogram tells you about clustering and peaking on individual time frames.
If your data is not discrete and is continuous, you can use a line graph or an area chart.
download bmml source – Wireframes created with ...
4
Many many devices use time for various functions, from recording shows on DVD, to automatically starting your coffee at a specific time, to sounding an alarm. Most devices of wildly differing types are not compatible with each other. That is to say, my phone generally doesn't talk to my coffee machine, and neither of them interface with my DVD player. As ...
3
As a complete and utter counterpoint to this whole concept -- Should we really treat adults like teenage gamers?
Forget about scores, points, and badges.
Get some real money involved!
Late reports cost your company money. People that report on time save money.
Track who reports on time and reward them -- with cash.
If management won't go for cash ...
3
Go Positive
Shaming is counterproductive; here's an article on shaming as a bad motivator to losing weight. So, positive rewards for good behavior are the way to go.
Three Goals To This Game
That leaves you with a few goals and many strategies. For goals, you want 1) top performers to push the ceiling up and set new standards, 2) worst performers to do ...
3
As I mentioned in a comment above, traditional typography habits are that you align numeric data with some form of decimal divider (decimal point with numbers, colon with times, etc). Word processors have long had this ability with lining tabs that allow you to do just that.
Alas, no such thing exists with HTML/CSS.
On option is to use a monospaced font. ...
3
One option that I would think I would find appealing to use is to have 2 main elements:
A list of possible "tasks"
A calendar
Then, the behavior is to:
Drag/drop a task onto the calendar
Stretch that task to cover the time-slots desired
Drag/drop the lengthened task to re-position it as needed
Then, as tasks need to be rearranged, you can simply grab ...
3
The alternative of AM/PM is not "military" as you point out, it is what almost the entire world uses.
You say "it would be nice to support both time formats". I would like to disagree with you there. It would be nice if your application takes into account what the user's preference is and only show time in that format.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
