Time Zone Drop-Down List – A Painful User Experience

Summary

We use lot of apps in our day to day life and when we sign-up for any new apps, selecting the time zone in the drop-down list is a big pain and should be replaced with something easy.

Problem

When you sign-up for a new web app, most of the time you will need to select your time zone. If you are in list of first few than you are lucky, otherwise you end up scanning each item through the list of time zones which is really a painful experience.  For example you are in Rome it’s very difficult to find your time zone in the list.

And the worst part, you can’t even press a key to go to your time zone, you have to scroll and scan each line until you find yours.  Luckily these time zones are sorted from west to east (-12 to +12), so if you are in Australia you k now your time zone would be some where in the last. And if you know if your time zone is any specific like (-5 India) than  you can go right there, but unfortunately not all the people knows this as most people are local to their country and they don’t care about this.

It’s very strange how lot of web apps ignore this being fact that their users are from the whole world.  And I am sure many of users give up selecting time zone, which may lead to the confusion later while using the app with the time not showing accurate.

I think it’s the time to rethink this and come up with a solution that is simple and easy to use.

Solution

You can determine user’s time zone using js & php script and populate it however you want.