Products · Pattern or everyday thing
date formats
Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2015–2025), in 7 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Settings example uses ambiguous day-month values, unclear date orderUnreviewed
20152026- Can't tell whether a date is month-first or day-first2021-02-26
- Ambiguous numeric dates like 11/3/2021 cause confusion about day and month order2021-02-26
- Settings example uses ambiguous day-month values, so users can't tell which order a date format uses2020-05-22
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 6 complaints
- Can't tell whether a date is month-first or day-first2021-02-26
- Ambiguous numeric dates like 11/3/2021 cause confusion about day and month order2021-02-26
- Settings example uses ambiguous day-month values, so users can't tell which order a date format uses2020-05-22
- Reader misreads dates because the format is ambiguous between mm/dd and dd/mm2020-05-13
- Two date formats on one page can confuse readers, such as D/M/Y versus M/D/Y2017-10-23
- Relative times like 'yesterday' hide the precise time; numeric dates like 11/09/14 are ambiguous2015-07-03