"Datepicker" where user can specify approximate date

Question

I'm building an application where a user should be able to enter a date, but where I want to allow for "approximate" dates, such at the 19th century or the 1950th. Sometimes the user also knows the month and date, sometimes not.

I could do this with various options and selectors, but since this will be used over and over again, I would really like it to be quick an easy.

From a logical views, it should be fairly straight forward since you start by entering the century, then (optionally) a decade, then (optionally) a year etc. But I can't get my head around how you would design this in an intuitive matter where a user can enter this quickly.

Answer 1

Genealogy apps (like MyHeritage, for example) have the similar problems that they solve somewhat ok, i think.

What they do is adding a dropdown before the date picker to choose what kind of date it is: exact, circa, unsure, before, after, etc.

This particular dropdown has these options, that make sense in genealogy world (because sometimes you get data from testimonies, or partially readable gravestones, or whatever), but you can see whichever you need.

Interestingly enough, they allow even more complex structures: like if you know the date period, they allow you to enter more than one date:

Hopefully it helps.

Answer 2

Based on what you have described, there really isn't any standard input field that will satisfy the various inputs that the user can provide, except for a free text field. But this means you will have to do a lot of work to ensure that the data can be understood and processed unambiguously.

Rather than potentially creating a lot of work for yourself, it might be easier for the user to enter a standard date containing the year, month and date, and then give them an option to see the range of dates that should be searched for. This is similar to a user selecting a location on a map and then specifying the radius around the area to search for.