[Sigia-l] Calendar Control and date/time input

[Faith D'Lamater]

Dave,
 
How appropriate that you raise this issue.  Two hours ago I accidentally
bought a flight ticket for May when I intended April.  I blame it entirely
on Continental.com's home page flight search set up and refuse to admit user
error!  ;-)  
 
Pop-up calendars provide helpful cues that drop downs don't, such as today's
date and day of the week.   Earlier today, if I had selected my departure
date from a calendar, I would have seen the red circle around April 12 and
immediately recognized that I need to travel three days from now, not next
month.  (Don't laugh.. it's Friday... I'm very tired....)
 
Incidentally, Continental.com offers a popup calendar deeper in its site, so
I'm thinking they tried to avoid weighing down the home page.  Of course
this is valid, although I would wait longer for the extra convenience of a
calendar, even if I wasn't using DSL.
 
BTW, my observations seem more applicable to travel dates, rather than
birthdays or other events that are fixed in my mind and not important
relatively to today's date, weekends, etc.
 
Faith
 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Heller, David [mailto:david.heller at documentum.com]
Sent: Friday, April 12, 2002 3:42 PM
To: 'SIGIA (E-mail)'
Subject: [Sigia-l] Calendar Control and date/time input



Hi gang, 

I've been contemplating the use of calendar controls (ya know, a calendar
popsup in month format and allows you to click on a date to fill out a date
form) as I'm creating an app that currently has a requirement for this.

What do people think of the use of this control? 

Why isn't there a similar control for time used on the web? 
How do people feel when they have the calendar control & a text input field
together? 
How do people feel about time inputs as pull down menus vs. text input w/
format hint (& validation)? 

Any other comments regarding this subject would be appreciated. 

Thanks, 

-- dave 

David Heller 
Sr. UI Designer - User Experience Group 
Docuemtum, Inc. (Pleasanton #6025) 
1-925-600-5636 
http://www.documentum.com/ <http://www.documentum.com/>  
david.heller at documentum.com 
AIM: bolinhanyc // Yahoo: dave_ux //MSN: hippiefunk 
  
-- "If it is not useful, it will never be usable." 

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