Good practice for entering multiple dates

Question

I have a web application where the user can plan an event an set dates for this event. Generally speaking, what is a good interface for entering those dates?

The requirements are:

• The date is a day with an hour (eg, wednesday december 5, at 13h30)
• There is no duration for each date, only the date itself
• Most of the time, the used will enter from 1 to 5 dates (so the maximum should be around 10 or 20)

So far, we have implemented a system where you have a jQuery datepicker, and you can add other datepickers with a + add date button, and there is also an option to repeat a date for a given hour and a day of the week (with a checkbox for each day). For example, you can specify something quivalent to: tuesday december 6 at 14h00 and saturday december 8 at 18h25 and every monday at 17h00. Unfortunately, this system is a bit complex and some users are lost.

Another solution I have thought of is a simple jQuery multiple datepicker like this one.

So, do you think those are good solutions? Is there a common or more intuitive way of selecting multiple dates?

Answer 1

An interface like Google Calendar's Week View should be good for your task (I don't think you will need all the functionality, but only an idea of how things may look like), user will be able to scroll through the dates (and months) and add event reminders for the certain time. You may also add a list of planned events to help user to overview all of the scheduled events and maybe let him to edit or remove them.

The good thing here is that user will be able to select date and time in just one step. Using datepickers will split this procedure into two steps, will make interface more complex and may require additional validation, etc.