Nowadays, when usability sounds a little bit old fashioned. But it still gives interaction designers very good challenges.
I was a design a form where the user could select his arrival time. The old solution from which my design started, used a dropdown menu with 24 hour time format. You had 1.00 to 24.00.
I thought that I should have had to look into alternatives to a long list of values. The first thing I considered was the a second dropdown menu with AM and PM as values. In this way, the first list would have been half the length (with values from 1.00 to 12.00) since users would have selected also the AM or PM.
The topic was interesting and I’ve also started a discussion on IxDA.org with some interesting suggestions, like using ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ (more natural but I could see some issues with that) or an input field with a tip telling you could use any format (12, 4am) and so on.
Later on, I had a discussion with a content manager, who had also an international look on the theme. She told me that AM \ PM was not universally understood, which was quite surprising to me: the point was that I was not questioning myself from a real user’s perspective. Moreover:
is not clear at all if 12AM is midnight of noon.
In the end, I have chosen to keep the dropdown list with the 24 hours value because I didn’t have any specific data on that except the fact that users didn’t have any problem with this interaction. This also taught me that as designers we tend to make new things, to improve, to re-design, probably because that’s what we like to do. But it should be clear at the beginning what are the real issues and what are exercises or experiments that “may” lead to something better. Obviously, testing is the key in these cases.
