input fields - When and why should date pickers be used?

The above screenshot is from an airline's website.

Date pickers are somewhat common on websites - they're especially common for circumstances when you're booking events. Most often when they appear, you have the option to enter a date (via text box, dropdowns, etc) or to click a button that gives you a date picker.

This morning I've been studying why these are used - and when they should be used - in the context of a PC application or PC-accessed website. (There's plenty of reason to use them for touch devices like tablets or phones, so that is not the focus of this question.)

I've considered:

• They aren't helpful for when the date is known, and shouldn't be used in those circumstances. Steam and Gmail don't offer a date picker for selecting your birth year, for instance.


• They are helpful for getting to pick a not-yet-known date in context. When you're scheduling something, your choice of date will be influenced by which day of the week, or which week of the month, you're booking in.

But that's only two points. I'm sure there must be more to it I'm overlooking.

When should we use date pickers, and why should we use them?

Answer

Date pickers are helpful when your concerned dates fall within the context of a month or so but not several years apart as jumping between years would require laboriously many clicks.

Date selectors are not just helpful in reducing the typing errors but they also standardize the formats when several correct variations are possible. For Americans, the correct format of date is month/day/year but for Australians, it is date/month/year. Besides these cultural differences, date may be valid in all these formats.

1. 04/01/2014


2. 01/04/2014


3. 04 Jan 2014


4. 4 January, 2014


5. January 4th, 2014


6. 2014/01/04

Major problem comes when date format is valid but it can be interpreted in two different ways. 04/01/2014 could be 4th of January 2014 as well as 1st of April, 2014. A Visual Date Picker tool will help us resolve such potential problems.

Now coming towards Date of Birth again, I do not prefer a single input box to enter complete date of birth because of the same day/month confusion. A better approach would be to let user select month from a drop-down menu and type-in date and year through input boxes, as used by Google.