What is gmt time zone
We ran 2 rounds of moderated tests using think-aloud protocol. We recruited from these 4 countries to control for and study any differences in behavior and familiarity with time zones across different geographical regions. For our remote, unmoderated study, we recruited 83 people (42 men and 41 women, median age 37) from 4 countries: Australia (21 participants), the United States (22 participants), Germany (20 participants), and the United Kingdom (20 participants). We used to recruit participants for both studies. Whether grouping helps users to find their time zone in a dropdown.What people’s strategies are when using a search field within a time-zone selector.Which way of expressing time zones is more familiar (e.g., offset, time-zone name, city).What users expect when interacting with a time-zone selector.1 remote, unmoderated study with 83 participants from 4 countries (US, Australia, UK, and Germany).2 rounds of remote, moderated usability tests with 13 participants from 8 countries (UK, US, France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Australia, and UAE).To understand the best method of ordering and presenting time-zone selectors, we conducted: To reduce the length of the list, some of the time zones that share the same offset are grouped. Slack’s time-zone selector is organized by offset. The most frequently chosen time zones appear at the top of the list. However, offset from GMT is identical to the UTC offset. Google displays departure from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is technically a time zone, not a time standard. Google Calendar’s time-zone selector is ordered by offset. A search feature allows users to search by items appearing in the list. North American time zones appear first on the list (Calendly is an American company) and, instead of the offset, the current time is displayed. This approach results in fewer entries in the list (since multiple cities and countries share the same offset). Calendly displays time zones by region or continent. When reviewing some popular time-zone selectors, we found many different design approaches.
“I'm terrible with time zones, like really bad.” I don't know why they always go wrong, especially when it comes to scheduling for me.”
“This is something that I hate doing in most websites.” Participants in our recent research openly shared: Understandably, this is not a fun task for users. There is no universal way of organizing time zones.There are lots of ways in which people think about their time zone (offset, city, or time-zone abbreviations like PST) so choosing what to display in a time-zone selector can be challenging.There are many time zones to choose from, which means dropdowns can be long and hard to scan.This means that offsets in time-zone selectors need to be updated in real time when a time zone moves from standard time to daylight-savings time, and vice versa. A time zone can change its offset if it abides by daylight savings. by geographical region, such as continentĭesigning time-zone selectors can be tricky because:.Such a list could technically be sorted in several different ways: Usually, time zones are presented in a list such as a dropdown menu. The Challenges of Designing Time-Zone Selectors The Challenges of Designing Time-Zone Selectors.For example, New York, Detroit, Washington DC, Miami, Toronto, and Havana all share the same offset. An offset can be shared by more than one geographical region. For example, New York has an offset of UTC-04:00 in the summer and UTC-5:00 in the winter.
( Universal Coordinated Time is the main world standard for indicating time.) A geographical region can have different offsets at different times of the year if it observes daylight savings.
A time zone refers to a geographic region that shares the same time.To understand how we should design our time-zone selector, we conducted several rounds of quantitative and qualitative research.īefore jumping into the topic, it’s important to clarify some important terminology: Since we run live, virtual trainings, we implemented a time-zone selector to allow users to view the scheduled time of a course in a time zone of their choice. This article discusses findings from our research about how best to design a time-zone selector. They are commonly found in scheduling features, in the user-settings section of an application or website, and on websites that support live, virtual events - like our own. Time-zone selectors allow users to change the local time on a UI.