User available at times

Question

I was looking trough some answers best practices on 'user availability' or whatever it's called.

Let's say I'm a user renting out or providing some kind of service. Let's assume this is my side job.

So my availability would be weekends or holidays. If I was doing something full time my availability could be work days only etc etc.

How would one represent that to user that it looks presentable and comprehensive. Is there a website that has these kind of availability. I think something like this is more simpler than date pickers/hours pickers etc. for this purpose only though.

Simple availability information without giving exact time.

Any thoughts?

Question update (thanks 3nafish for good questions):

1. Are you just asking for a way to specify a set of days recurring each week? Yes this is exactly what I want. But not necessarily set of days, but rather group days into a group like weekdays instead of Saturday and Sunday. Want to simplify the user selection.

2. Or would people sometimes need to specify times combined with the days? I would stay away from specifying times, again it seems to complicated to gather that info from the user and I want user to provide as little input as possible. Selecting certain times can lead to all sort of problems which I'm trying to avoid by providing higher level selection groups like (workdays workhours, weekend night time , Holiday midday etc). I'm basically trying to think of the names of these higher level time groups.

3. Would the availability always be the same each week? - Yes

Answer 1

I think a calendar-like interface would work best here, very similar to Outlook or Google Calendar. It's great that you want to keep it simple and easy to use, so I would brainstorm something that reveals more options/complexity if the user wants to be more specific, but presents something very simple initially:

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

Most users would only require weekly availability with one of the assumed time intervals. But as the second mockup shows, they could specify completely custom times or custom recurrence. I didn't mockup the Yearly one, but I was envisioning that being a full blown calendar with the current year where they could pick individual days (and that's where the "Holidays" quick-selection button would come into play).

I think no matter what widgets you go with, the summary label at the bottom is really helpful to the user (where their selection reads like a sentence) so they have the confidence your interface captured their intent.