UX Advice: Timezones

Process & Techniques
#1

Good afternoon all,

I am looking for some other opinions on some best practices for displaying timezones.

Here is the scenario: A national television network only runs on Eastern Standard time. Meaning, if a show airs at 8pm EST, it will air at 5 Pacific Time. The site currently will say something like “Premiering Tuesday at 8 ET”. This leaves it up to the user to figure out when the proper time would be in their timezone.

In my mind, two things can happen.

  1. Users will generally miss out on the “ET” designation and assume it is 8:00 in their time zone as well. So those on the West Coast will miss the show by three hours.

  2. Users WILL understand the ET designation and know they need to tune in at 5:00 if the live in California.

I would think the majority will follow the 1st scenario.

Currently, all times are entered manually, so their isn’t a way to automatically show the correct time depending on TimeZone (I would like this to be possible in a future redesign).

Has anyone else run into to anything similar? If so, what did you do? Specify both eastern and pacific times? Leave it at just Eastern and hope west coast users can do the math?

Would be very interested in other opinions.

Thanks.

Cory

#2

Hey Cory,
Welcome. :slight_smile:

Is there a downside to specifying both?

#3

I’ve seen webcasts that state a time and have a link to ‘find out what time this is in your area’ its works great. But it can be a pain going to another website to find this out.

A popup widow allowing a user to find this out on the page would be a great option.

Paddy