Yes I'm shocked by how UIs dealing with very precise things sometimes use imprecise dating like "tomorrow".
On the DHL website, if I am ordering a collection for a certain time, I have to choose if I want it for "tomorrow". If it's 23:00 BST from where I am accessing the website and I'm ordering the collection from a country in EEST, am I ordering the collection for one or two days from now?
This kind of sloppy UI from a company that does logistics (which is supposedly quite a precise thing) is utterly unacceptable.
The DHL website is a cornucopia of bad UI patterns.
Yes. Worst case is not printing the year, even for items which are from a previous year. ISO 8601 is the international standard on how to write dates and times. Get used to it. XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1179/
Japan has a strange tradition of dates and times such as 7-3 2530. Tokyo TV schedules have values like that. "2530" means 0130 on the next day. Businesses that close after midnight may give their closing time as "2600". This comes from a strange combination of military time plus a historical tradition that days start at dawn. At least it's unambiguous.
I really like this idea. In fact just yesterday I was thinking about it makes much more sense to group activities that happen after midnight with the "previous" day.
I'd be a lot more OK if all "humanized" dates could be toggled to an ISO date with a button click.
It's so true though, if trying to scrutinize the history of a repo I find I frequently need to clone it locally just to access the info I need in any kind of decent interface.
I know it's not perfect, but in case you're not aware... Although Github shows you relative time, they use time [0] elements and set the title (which you can see if you hover over the time) to show more detail, e.g. "Jul 2, 2015, 9:13 PM PDT". In addition to that, they set datetime as ISO-8601, e.g. "2015-07-03T04:13:48Z".
If you wanted, you could make a script to always display the expanded information.
A lot of websites do this, and I think it works out very well. It means you can hover over the time if you want something more precise, but the default level of information shown to you is minimized. This is useful for reducing clutter and information overload.
It really depends on what information you're trying to convey, and where it falls within the hierarchy.
Yep, I know about the title attribute and the hover display. I still disagree with the choice. Why make the user hover to get the precise date? The worst offender is the commits screen. I know that each day's commits section has the full date, but if the commits for a day are longer than the viewport, I find myself scrolling up to find the exact date of the commit (much easier than hitting the small target of the humanized date and waiting for the hover state to appear). I understand that humanized dates are better than ISO-8601 for some things, but commit dates, no, not IMO. "About a month ago" is useless to me.
"3 days ago" is not useful to me when I'm comparing dates.
I'd say it depends what you're doing. It's easier to compare lengths of time than dates - the difference between "3 days ago" and "5 days ago" is more obvious than the difference between "01/07/2015" and "28/06/2015". That said, if you want to know what happened on a specific date (eg commits that happened on 28/06/2015) then the time passed isn't useful. Ideally you should be able to toggle between the two.
I have a constant low-level battle in my company (not DHL) to try to folks to understand that we are an international company... and therefore their fields like "completed on" need a time-component, because not everyone has the same workday.
These are "product owners" who are themselves in satellite offices in other timezones...
Thrashing out the requirements of plotting the time a trade of a USA municipal bond was made when the two groups of users of the system are New York and Tokyo was a fun experience!
On the DHL website, if I am ordering a collection for a certain time, I have to choose if I want it for "tomorrow". If it's 23:00 BST from where I am accessing the website and I'm ordering the collection from a country in EEST, am I ordering the collection for one or two days from now?
This kind of sloppy UI from a company that does logistics (which is supposedly quite a precise thing) is utterly unacceptable.
The DHL website is a cornucopia of bad UI patterns.