Sick Day

I’m taking a sick day so just a quick post linking over to something from culture writer Brian Wise back in July, 2017: Five Things Every Orchestra Website Should Get Right.

Of particular interest is the recommendation about date formats:

International users: Your date format should be clear and understandable outside the U.S. (as much of the world doesn’t follow a month/day/year format and wall-style calendars often start on Mondays).

About two years ago, I started recommending to my Venture Platform users that they favor date formats using textual (spelled out) versions of days and months to help avoid confusion on this very issue.

Case in point, we made sure to integrate the ability to manually set date format on a per event list basis in order to provide as much flexibility as possible. For example, using “Sep” is better suited than “September” for something like a sidebar or footer widget.

This is a great example of a tiny, but important, element of overall user experience and accessibility that is often overlooked.