On date select field, should the weekday be displayed after selection ?

Question

I have a date selection field in a reservation field. The standard popin calendar is there to help users select a date, with a the top the weekday names in short form. After the day is selected, there is no way to tell what the selected weekday is apart from remembering it.Would it be useful to display the selected weekday name next to the field ?

The idea is to avoid users opening the calendar again because they forgot or clicked without being sure.

Answer 1

If you are finding that a lot of your users are double checking that the date is correct, or that reservations are having to be corrected later because the date is wrong, then an extra verification that the date is the one selected wouldn't hurt.

For example - on my phone when I write a text I select the recipient(s) from a list of names. However, back on the text screen only the number is displayed. This gives me a momentary doubt that I've selected the correct people. When I do hit send the confirmation is that I've sent the text to a named person. The flow of this would (in my opinion) be better if the person's name was displayed at all times.

So in your case adding "Wed" to "15/12/2010" seems to be a sensible thing to do.

Answer 2

In general, I would certainly agree with ChrisF - displaying the weekday will certainly help recollection. How much it will help depends, of course, on some specifics of the system: exactly what are users reserving, are they ever choosing more than one date, are they choosing a range of dates, what happens if the day they choose is unavailable, what kind of confirmation is there, etc.?

Displaying the weekday has the slight disadvantage that you might need to internationalise it.

Answer 3

I agree with ChrisF and in addition to his answer I also include the number of days ago the date occurred i.e. yesterday, two weeks ago, 3 months ago. It makes sense for my application, but not sure about yours.