What pros and cons do you experience when using datepickers in web forms or software?
What do you think is missing sometimes?
What bugs you when using a datepicker?
I want to know, either from user-input view or from a datepicker-integrator view.
There are already some questions like Better way for users to select a date range but I'm aiming for thoughts and opinions currently available datepickers are not implementing.
Birth year: They keep starting at the current year, when most people will be 18+ and have to scroll more than 18 years to get to their age. They feel old and have to scroll a lot.
Date Picker vs just typing it in: unless the date requires context of other dates or you need to select a range, just let people type in the date. Its proven that people don't mind typing in short fields. They aren't as dumb as you think. haha
Date Ranges: Allow for dragging.
Date Picker: Help your users out and include common holidays (maybe depending on country chosen) and integration of their own calendar. I knew a few times I made the mistake of choosing something over another date.
Birth Year: Just forget a picker for this, let me type in my age. (Edit: Pointy added that you may not want to do this when the year is important because some people view their age differently. To add to that I know that in Iran, for example, they count their age differently and so count themselves 1 year than those in the U.S. would.)
Happy Birthday: If they the enter their birthday into the form, and it's the day, have some special message for them.
Choose generic mark up: Don't give your forms special names be generic so autofill takes care the rest.
3rd Party Log in: When you are able, let them skip out on forms all together and sign in with twitter, facebook, google, etc.
Date of Birth: Pickers for dates of birth are just inappropriate and too cumbersome. Either let the user choose from a series of drop-downs (controversial?) or type the date as free-text (and then validate it for them).
(Tangent: I only mention the drop-down vs. text field issue because, in my experience within a certain context, the former has a consistently better conversion rate)
Times: Time choosing is generally poorly thought out, I think. A user should be able to type a time (in some controlled/validated way). Potentially using a field mask or something like that. I don't like a time picker deciding that I can only choose 5 minute increments or forcing me to use 2 drop-downs to define my time.
Date Ranges: Link the fields so that the value of one will become the max/min of the other e.g. don't allow user to choose a "To" date that is less than their chosen "From" date (and vice versa).
Credit card expiration dates: All my cards have the date as digits, so why do so many sites use a data picker that has word months? Even to the sad point of using choices like "Jan (01)".
