lists - Unambiguous way to display timezone information in a compact manner

When displaying a listing of events, each with their own date, time, and timezone, I'd like to present the timezone that the given event has been assigned. However, there is potentially a lot of information to convey. Two options I've considered are:

1. UTC offset - e.g. 2010-08-16 4:15 pm (+5:00 GMT)


2. Timezone abbreviation - e.g. 2010-08-16 4:15 pm EST

My problems with these are:

1. As soon as I see the plus (or minus) with the GMT offset, I feel like I need to do the math. How does the user know if the displayed time has already been adjusted? Also, if daylight saving is in effect for that timezone, this is misleading.



2. There's information missing here. There are a lot of timezones and I have yet to find an authoritative list of timezone abbreviations. The closest seems to be this TimeAndDate.com list. Alternatively, there is the tz database list, but I don't think users would know what to do with this.

So, my question is, how can I convey which timezone a given event occurs in, given that there is going to be a list of them on the screen?

Answer

Time zones are a great example of horrible UX in everyday concepts. It's not DMMT: if you tell me an event is at 7pm GMT+4, then first I have to think of where I am in relation to GMT, and then I have to add 4 hours. What a mess!

Instead, think of the different things you can do with time if you're able to calculate or design. For instance:

• Show a map with a pin in your location and a pin in the event's location with a ticking digital clock above each pin showing what time it is in each location. This works well if you have an event overview page and you know who the logged in user is.


• Do the work for me and say "(this event takes place at) 3:15 AM on Thursday, your time" in plain English. Or if you're in a table, put "Takes place at (your time)" in the column header and just print "3:15 AM on Thursday" in the cell. This works well for notifications or streams.


• Use relative time to avoid having to be specific (this depends on the use case obviously). If dates are far in the future, who cares what time they are? Just say "in 2 weeks". If they're within a certain margin, get more specific: "in 3h44m". Those time should be relative to the user's time zone.



• Still need to display time zones (for some reason)? Display a map like this one:

And perhaps highlight the time zone the event takes place in when the user hovers over an event in the list. You could even combine that with my first suggestion.

Ideally though, use plain English and rely on real-world metaphors as much as you can to display information. Obviously you have a constraint: you need to show information concisely in a list. But that's the challenge for this design.