Topic: Displaying timezone info

[hans]

I'm working on a project at work and I'm trying to decide how we want to handle time displays.

It's similar to the message board where we've got people doing stuff from multiple time zones. But what I'm thinking that it might be nice to actually display the relative time of when the actions were being done. So instead of me seeing ethics posts at my 2am it would display the actual time he posted (in his timezone).

I'm looking for gotcha's. And general thoughts on the subject.

[charlie]

In general, I think that would be very confusing. First, do you really want to advertise each person's time zone? For some forums, that is kind of a private detail that some wouldn't want shared. If people are ok with it being shared, then I would consider putting both times up because it's hard to get a relatively chronology if the times are all on different bases.

[Perspective]

I think it'd be confusing too, you'd have to start calculating when the post actually took place relative to your time zone.

[hans]

We already have that information, we store the information in GMT in the database and format the display time based on time zone from the user's profile information (so they see everything in their own time zone).

Timezone is not a sensitive field in our system so it can be displayed when necessary.

The problem I'm running into right now is exactly what you guys have said, it's confusing. As I try to explain it to other people, I get that "huh?" stare; which tells me either it's a bad idea or I'm just not thinking right.

I guess I should expand a little more on the project. The forum reference is misleading.

We have people managing multiple groups of employees (which could be in multiple time zones). Since the person managing the groups might be in a different time zone than those being managed (which might include multiple zones) I was thinking it might be nice to let the manager see the times relative to the time zone they happened in. I'm not sure right now how important that actually is right now though vs. how confusing it seems to be. The consensus right now is just to allow the manager to switch their time zone if they feel like it.

[charlie]

I work with people in different time zones, and I want every time I see to be based on my time zone.

Trying to figure out whether somebody did some work at 8am their time or not is not very important.

Trying to figure out whether somebody did some work an hour ago or 15 hours ago is important.

If you want to provide an option to show the employees' time zones as well, then maybe that could be useful, but in my opinion you should always have all times readily available in the user's local time zone.

[webwhy]

why not provide an "instant time zone translation" widget of some sort.  If a manager wants to the the time of the event in the event generator's time zone, he can use the widget.