Which Timezone to show the user?

Question

Our application runs on servers that might sit in another country. They will process money transfers from banks and each transfer might origin by a different user from a different country. The transaction will gather rules, audits, notes, and other information along the way, and each will have its date and time.

I have a problem deciding which timezone to show the user.

The back end (processing information) will be kept in UTC to make everything simple, but is it common to display UTC to users?

Also, we have multiple dates and date&time fields on our forms (for example: create date&time, processing date&time, settlement date&time, credit date, debit date...)

Should we translate the date&time to the user timezone always? Should we show UTC?

Any help will be great, Thanks

Answer 1

It is very technical to show UTC to users. Nobody really knows their offset to the UTC timezone, so I would suggest showing all times in the user's local time zone (Running some javascript in the user's browser seems to do just that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1091372/getting-the-clients-time-zone-and-offset-in-javascript).

I would always translate times into the user's timezone. But maybe you also want to show the timezone of origin of an event. E.g. I am sending you 5€ at night in my local time. The information when the money was sent might be interesting to the user.

Answer 2

I think you should think from a users' perspective. What does it make more sense for your users? Me, as a user, I always compare times with my own timezone and when I check a transaction history I want to see the time when that happened and if I did that transaction.

• If I see a transaction in the list that was made at 3am my time, I'm pretty sure that was not me.
• If I see a transaction in a UTC time and have to calculate what was that time for me, I already lost some time of reaction to claim a refund or mark it as suspicious.