Minor UX Appreciation: Timezone Change Awareness

I recently got on a plane.¹ In particular it was an early flight, so I had to set an alarm in order to wake up many hours earlier than I otherwise would have. And the day I had to get up early was exactly the day that the clocks changed due to Daylight Savings.

I have an Android phone, and I use the Clock app that comes as default. It’s not a “world clock” and it doesn’t have any fancy features. It tells you the time, it sets alarms, it has a countdown timer and it has a stopwatch. That’s a same feature set as my physical watch, and like my physical watch, on most days I spend exactly zero seconds thinking about whether it’ll do what I expect. Most days, however, do not involve a change of timezone. On this day I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to set an alarm for the appropriate time the next day.²

Thankfully though, the default android clock has thought of this. When you set an alarm, it has a little popup that tells you how far into the future the alarm was set (by which I mean something like “in 8 hours” instead of “tomorrow at 4pm”). Now I appreciate that every time - usually in horror at how little time I have before I need to wake up - but this time around it worked even better than I had anticipated. In particular, what I had not realised before is that it does this while taking into account the possibility that daylight savings might change the clocks between the time when you set the alarm and the time when the alarm goes off.

My main stress on this particular day was that I didn’t know what the clock was doing under the hood. I didn’t think I’d have any way of knowing whether or not it would go off at the right time. That little popup telling me how many hours in the future it would go off taking into account the time change gave me just enough information to be sure that it would do the correct thing. Without that popup, no matter how I set the alarm I would be left stressing about whether I’d wake up at the right time.

As somebody who knows just enough about programming with calendars to know that it’s a scary prospect, I appreciate that this feature involves a fair amount of work under the hood. I’m glad somebody somewhere has done all of that unglamorous work.

That’s it. This post exists just to call out the existence of that feature, and the fact that I appreciate it.

I feel like these sorts of features are under-appreciated. Developers make a big show of telling people how their software is “AI powered” or “web scale” or uses “big data” or whatever. None of these things matter to users. What matters to users is that they have a good experience using your software. These small improvements add up and I don’t think we collectively appreciate these little things enough.

So I’d like to try calling them out in posts like this when I notice them. Often I won’t notice them, maybe that’s the point, but when I do I want to call them out and share the appreciation. I’m not the only one either. A while back a friend of mine wrote a blog post highlighting a small UX-improving feature in the app he uses to listen to podcasts. If you ever write about software on the internet then I’d encourage you to do that too.

Together we can appreciate well-made software that already exists, and encourage an increase in the quality of software yet to be made.