What’s the best way to display dates to international users?
By: Maria Panagiotidi
Tags: Design, Usability, Software Development, UX, User Experience

What’s the best way to display dates to international users?

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Date-entry fields are culture-dependent and can potentially confuse users who are accustomed to a different format. The aim of this report is to investigate how internationalization affects date formatting and ways this can be handled to ensure a good user experience.

Date notation around the world

What does “10/11/06” mean to you:

10 November 2006?

October 11, 2006?

2010 November 6?

Your answer depends on the part of the world you’re from. Different cultures have developed their own ways of expressing dates. The two major ones are usually MM-DD-YYYY (month, day, year) and DD-MM-YYYY (day, month, year). (i.e., 06–18–2021 and 18–06–2021).

It is important to be aware of the forms of all-numeric calendar dates used in a particular country to know what date is intended. Dates such as “10/11/06”, mentioned earlier, can be interpreted as “10 November 2006” in the DMY format, “October 11, 2006” in MDY, and “2010 November 6” in YMD. This can result in dates that are impossible to understand correctly without knowing the writer’s origin and/or other contextual details.

The ISO 8601 format YYYY-MM-DD (2021–06–08) is intended to solve this issue and ensure accuracy in all situations (see ISO section).

ISO 8601 (XKCD comic)

The image below shows the preferred date format in various countries.

image by TopoChecker

A detailed list of countries with their preferred date formats can be found here.

ISO notation

International Standard ISO 8601–1:2019 specifies numeric representations of date and time. This standard notation helps to avoid confusion in international communication caused by the many different national notations and increases the portability of computer user interfaces.

ISO recommends writing the date as:

YYYY-MM-DD,

where YYYY is the year, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 31.

For example, the fourth day of October in the year 2021 is written in the standard notation as 2021–10–04.

ISO 8601 is only specifying numeric notations and does not cover dates and times where words are used in the representation (e.g., Feb 2022). In addition to this, the separating colons can be omitted (e.g., 2021–10–04 or 2021 10 04).

Separators used in date formatting

Another thing we need to be cautious about when looking at date format and date-entry fields are separators. Separators used in international date formats can be grouped into seven categories:

-

/

.

,

empty space between day/month/year

no symbol

yyyy年m月d日 (China, Singapore, Japan)

Suggestions

The best format to use depends on context and application. One of the principles of Designing Harmonious Interactions by Alan Cooper states that we should design for the probable and provide for the possible. This means is that we should aim to give users the most commonly needed or useful information, and then provide for them to get into more detailed information that not everyone may want to see.

“Design for the probable, provide for the possible.” — Alan Cooper

For a more intuitive UX, we can let the user choose the format they are most familiar and comfortable with. This can be done either by getting information from the system settings of the user or giving users the option to select their preferred format. Independent of the approach we choose adding labels and separating the fields to make it clear which fields are for the month, day, and year can prevent user errors. An example of this is displayed below:

Date picker from Material Design

Adding calendar pickers can also clarify what data the user needs to enter. An example by Microsoft is shown below. Using calendar pickers is appropriate for events close to the present time or for selecting date ranges.

When catering to international users spelling out the name of the month is another way to reduce ambiguity, prevent errors, and help users. The examples below demonstrate this.

Date-picker from the Trainline Android App

Date-picker from Google Flights

Using local settings is useful for apps for personal use or for teams based in the same country but can sometimes cause catastrophic errors in international teams. In such cases using the ISO standard format is preferable. The ISO standard is also better suited for more technical users as it allows them to sort dates as strings (e.g., ascending order).

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