What's the best approach to get Date/Time input from the user?
This is a wheel that's been re-invented again and again over the years.
The Problem: The user needs to input a Date/Time
Basic considerations
- We want to make it as easy as possible for the user to enter the desired date/time
- Some applications call for historical dates, some applications call for future dates only, some will need to handle both
- We want to prevent the user from entering jibberish data
- We want to auto-populate this control as aggressively as possible.
- We want this control to be as re-usable as possible.
Popular solutions include:
- Text Boxes
- Combo Boxes
- Pop-out calendars
- Server-side and/or client-side validation
- Various ways of alerting the users about bad data
There are a panoply of ready-to-eat solutions about, but I'm looking for some more general information. Have there been any usability studies done on the various date-time-control approaches? Is there a "best" date-time control out there? Are there any well-established "Dos and Don'ts"?
Related question: Best GUI control(s) to describe a time range
Answer
My preference is for a text input with an elipsis button next to it:
Enter a date [ ] [...]
The elipsis would pop up a calendar to populate the text input, but the user can type in a date if they want. Validation should be done when the "OK" button for the form is pressed - trying to do date validation on a character by character basis is doomed, in my experience.
The validation should be sophisticated and allow expressions like
"today"
"Tomorrow"
"23 Jan"
etc.
Edit: In reply to some comments, one could do validation when the text edit loses focus (though I hate that kind of thing) in which case the edit content could change from "23 Jan" to "23-01-2009" to indicate that the exprssion was understood.