Letting a user specify a preference using an example

I recently came across an elegant demonstration for getting the user to specify a preference by offering examples to choose from. This technique is often done with visual settings (e.g., letting a user select a template for a document by clicking on sample template thumbnails), but in this case, the technique was applied in letting a user specify a simple textual setting for a date format.

I've been looking at some web sites that help manage To Do lists, including tadalists.com, rememberthemilk.com, and mypimp.com. (Where do they get these names? The latter could adopt the slogan, "We think having a borderline offensive name is so funny it's worth giving up market share!") All these sites strive to be as interactive as possible, and to some extent they each struggle with the absence of conventions for entering data on highly interactive web pages. This has produced some interesting and creative UI experiments, some of which succeed.

One bit of creativity (albeit in a non-interactive area) shows up in the account setup page for rememberthemilk.com:

It's the last line that caught my attention. The label for the radio buttons doesn't even say what you're picking (preferred date format), but it's obvious what you're supposed to do: pick the sample that shows the date the way you like it. What's particularly interesting is that this trick capitalizes on a person's ability to recognize patterns at a subconscious level. I live in a country where the month comes before the date, so the first option ("14/02/05") looks like a jumble of numbers to me, while the second option ("02/14/05") leaps off the page as a valid date. Presumably people who live in date-first countries have the opposite reaction.

It may turn out that this trick only works in narrowly constrained circumstances; perhaps it would stop working, for example, if they needed to support a broader range of date formats. Nevertheless, it's impressive that rememberthemilk is able to ask for something as mundane as a date format in a manner consistent with the site's overall casual visual and textual tone.

Comments

[Christian Heindel]

I doesn't work for international users. I come from Germany and would have needed sth. like "14.02.2005" to quickly recognize the right format. (I think the dots are the important thing here...)

But one could detect the preferred browser language and use it to be much smarter at this point.

Nonetheless it is nice that they ask for the format. They show they care about you.

[Phil Wilson]

Well, presumably the fact that it's not in German in the first place is a giveaway that they're mainly differentiating for English-speaking countries (presumably the US and the UK), but the slashes are common across western Europe.

I really love this way of selecting the date.

[Tyler Klein]

Here is a slick one for you. I saw a demo given by the MSFT User Experience Designers on Halo. One of the problems they had was determining what direction is "up". It turns out that about half of users expect pushing down on the control pad to look up and half expect pushing up to look up. So at the outset of the game, they allow the user to "test out" their weapon by shooting a target just above their cross-hairs. If the user naturally presses down, then down becomes look-up. If they naturally press up then up becomes look-up. Either way, the user never knows that they set a preference, and the system responds as they expected it to.

[Jan Hoek]

Even though the most common date separator in Holland, where I live, is a dash, I instantly recognized the dd/mm/yy format. It seems the Germans are more attached to their dots than the Dutch are to their dashes... ;-)

[Steveo]

OK, It's a cool idea. But where's the question mark.

[Jonathan]

East-Asian people use 2005.02.14. And let's not forget the various lunar calendars...

[Chris]

And then there are the weird Americans (like me) who use 2005-Nov-30 or 2005-11-30.

[Richard]

It looks like "mypimp" goes to a different address... that's too bad, because it's only "borderline offensive" if you're looking for things to be offended by.

[J.M]

This looks like an interesting blog, however I am unable to subscribe to the RSS feed. The error (from newsgator -- complete): "Invalid URI: a port was expected because there is a colon present but the port could not be parsed."