[Design] Workflow for picking timezones

[Mimi Yin]

There's been a lot of discussion on Bug 4366: https:// 
bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4366 about what to do next  
to expand our timezone options. The use cases are as I understand it  
are:

1. Travelling: I am going somewhere next month and I need to schedule  
my meetings in that timezone. I don't want to have to switch my  
System timezone to be able to do that.
2. Conference call: I am scheduling a conference with someone in a  
different timezone.

I would say most of the time, users are not traveling to some exotic  
place (ie. Tasiilaq, Greenland) where they have no idea of what the  
nearest big city is. However, there will be times when all you know  
is your destination and the leap from that to the official Local time- 
zone requires a lot of investigation on your part.

So in the future, the ideal workflow would be:
1. Type in a destination.
2. Chandler spits back a list of options, plotted on a map that also  
shows your destination city, town, hamlet, hut in the middle of nowhere.

However this would require something more than just a plain text  
search of a list of all 577 timezones. We would need a database of  
cities, countries, states and provinces in order to do this well.

In the mean time, we are going to have the following in alpha2:
1. List of 5 timezones by default in the pull-down we have now in the  
detail view + whatever timezones you've imported + whatever timezones  
you're System has been set to since you've started using Chandler.
2. More... option at the bottom of the pull-down pops up a dialog  
that gives you 20 more options.
3. Expando option (View all timezones) in the dialog gives you the  
whole hog: 577 - (20 at the top + whatever is already in the pull-down).
4. Timezones are ordered by UTC offsets with checkboxes. Users can  
check-off which timezones they want to appear in the Detail view pull- 
down.
6. No removing default timezones from the Detail View pulldown. No  
user-defined ordering of timezones. No personalizing timezones names  
for now. You can only add more timezones to the pull-down.

Do we have nominations for what the 5 default timezones and 20 extra  
timezones should be?

Mimi


JeffreyH: checkboxes?
hamstar: yeah so how many tzs were you going to have
hamstar: all 577?
JeffreyH: Yes, but sorted by offset, scrollable.
JeffreyH: Alternately, we could filter out duplicates
hamstar: ok
JeffreyH: But it's nice to have both US/Pacific and America/Los_Angeles
hamstar: what if we just added a nother 10?
hamstar: seems like a lot of timezones
hamstar: or 20
JeffreyH: Gosh.  Seems like the point of other is that the person  
isn't finding their personal favorite
hamstar: yeah
hamstar: but mostly the rigth solution is to have a picker
JeffreyH: So if we're popping up a whole other widget, might as well  
give 'em all we've got
hamstar: where you can type and we give you matches
JeffreyH: yes, picker == right solution
JeffreyH: Oh
JeffreyH: I was thinking a map picker
JeffreyH: Well, what would you type?
hamstar: yeah but map picker + type in your city
hamstar: Ellenville, NY
hamstar: or Finland
JeffreyH: So, there are two issues, naming your TZ, and picking the  
right one
hamstar: at least the country or province, state
hamstar: yeah so we need a db for the optimal solution
hamstar: it doesn't need to be renamed, although that would be nice
hamstar: but you need to be able to find the right name, with the  
name you already know
hamstar: cuz i think the harder problem is finding the right timezone  
in the first place
JeffreyH: Right-o.
hamstar: but 80% of the time, people know the right timezone
hamstar: i'm just thinking that carefully picking out 20 timezones  
will be more usable than giving people 577 timezones
JeffreyH: Well, how about an expand-o widget (I'm really into o's  
today), 20 displayed by default
JeffreyH: expando gives you every friggin option
JeffreyH: then we satisfy folks in Burkina Faso and normal folks
hamstar: sure
JeffreyH: no denigration of Burkina Faso implied, but I think their  
density of computers is low
hamstar: what a cool name for a country tho
JeffreyH: Anyway, the point of the checkboxes would be to let you  
pick only Pacific, Eastern, and Paris, if you wanted
JeffreyH: So your dropdown would mostly only show what you were  
interested in.
JeffreyH: Hmm.  There's a problem with that, though
hamstar: yeah
JeffreyH: In that currently our display logic assumes any wacky  
imported TZ is definitely in your "show in lists"
JeffreyH: so we'd have to add a little logic to display not-standard  
timezones
JeffreyH: but that's no biggy
JeffreyH: So, what I'm hearing is:
JeffreyH: Continue to display 10 or so (actually, I'd make the  
default smaller), plus an "other ..." option
JeffreyH: displaying a reasonable list of 20 or so timezones
hamstar: yup
hamstar: 5 is good
hamstar: or 3
JeffreyH: with an expando widget to display all timezones known to  
god and ICU
hamstar: ok
hamstar: can we keep the 20 at the top
hamstar: even when you expando?
hamstar: that way they don't disappear cuz of the sort order?
JeffreyH: Yes, 20 at the top is good

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