Thursday, December 14, 2017

dates - Time after midnight, user experience


"Let's meet Saturday night at 2 o' clock" is "incorrect" and could never happen (calendar wise)



Midnight is the start of a new day. So anything after that is the next day (again, calendar wise)


But most people knows what is means and sees 2 o' clock after midnight as the same day


For most people it does not mean Sunday morning at 2 o' clock. Especially party-people, night owls etc. ;) At least in daily speech. "See you tonight at 2 o' clock!" etc.


This makes it difficult to have a user calendar with date/time on a website


Should I put a notice: "Remember, a calendar day starts/ends at 00:00 / 12 AM"? That could confuse people


Or do people already know this when dealing with a calendar?


How do you get about it?



Answer



That actually depends on the context. Imagine you're booking a flight and it says Saturday, 2am on the tickets. There's hardly any doubt that it's the night Fri-Sat and not the next night. It's a whole different thing if you're e.g. providing the running order of a music festival. Saturday, 2am there, is almost always technically Sunday, 2am, but this isn't a problem for users either as the days of a festival are logically splitted into e.g. Friday, Saturday and Sunday.


So what I'm trying to say is that you should try to get as much context as possible for users before you start adding warnings. A "Remember, the day starts/ends at 00:00 / 12 AM" warning for someone booking a flight could actually be more confusing than helpful. For someone taking track of his night out it could prove helpful though. I.e. If you provide a UI to enter events for Saturday, and the user adds an event for 2am after having added events for the same day for later times, then a warning could be helpful, if it's the first event of the day then it might be intentional.



The most important thing is to be consistent with displaying the data. Taking my examples, it would be very confusing if a concert that gets added to Sunday, 2am eventually shows up on the Saturday line-up.


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