fuzzytime

Humanising Date/times: Fuzzy Time

I first noticed this trend in Mac OS X's progress windows which would give "fuzzy" time estimates until completion, that is time esitmates of the form "about an hour" or "under a minute". My assertions are based only on assumptions, but I see this as good for two reasons. Firstly the time is usually only a fickle estimate with many variables so to give an estimate accurate to the second is misleading. Secondly the time is more human, that is your average human doesn't need to distinguish between, say, 58 minutes until completion and 56 minutes, or 1 minute, 15 seconds and 1 minutes, 11 seconds.

Mac OS X will also give some date/times as relative to the present. That is, if the file was modified yesterday or today the date string will say yesterday or today instead of explicitly listing the day of the month as usual. Again, an assumption I'm making is that date/times are easier for a human to understand if there is some context, the context here being current time and also that small differences in time are usually moot. The only case I can think of off the top of my head where you would need an exact explicit date/time is if you are making a direct comparison with something, maybe another file or a record somewhere.

This trend of using fuzzy and relative date/times seems to be a Good Thing, and it has been completely embraced by the Gnome desktop. (Although I can't see it explicitly stated in their HIG it is implied in the pictures, for time-remaining progress indicators for example, and it is also demonstrated in some applications, notably Nautilus.)

This fuzzy formatting of date/times is also visible in the weblog community. The new thing that I noticed introduced here is demonstrated by Dunstan Orchard of 1976design fame of fuzzying relative to the time of day, introducing phrases like "early morning" and "late evening". This practice again humanises the times as (from my experience) we tend to think of time relative to the things we do or remember, which I would guess includes the environment. So a general timeframe of "late evening" means just as much at a glance as 22:11, but saves us the bother of having to think about it in terms of the time of day.

One project that seems to be experimenting with relative times somewhat is Beagle. In some of the screencaps you can see times like "4 days ago", which generally I think I'd find more human than a day of the month. I'm sure I've seen more screenshots posted on p.g.o but they seem to have escaped me (on a side note, a p.g.o search engine would be really useful).

I'm curious as to how far this can be extrapolated. Things like times which a minute ago read "today" now all read "yesterday" depending on which side of midnight you are on. For fuzzy times to work, the computer will have to think in fuzzy times, or times that are meaningful to the user. Also, how far can you extrapolate relative dates. Will including key dates help? If a file is marked as being last modified "Christmas Day" or "On Your Birthday", would this help the user to understand with less effort than simply saying "December, 25" or (in my case) "November, 17".

On a related note I noticed a great suggestion, which seems pretty obvious in hindsight, made by Steven Garrity that IM clients should display local time for the recipient. A simple but excellent idea.