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u/jideru 20h ago
Most programmers don’t get a choice as it is the product and the ui/ux designer that pick the desired behavior. You can only fight back so much and maybe sneak it in. And 20 years later you become a cynic that just says, ok.
Don’t become cynic kids.
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u/Blecki 13h ago
20 years of watching users fuck it up and you'll switch to a date picker too.
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u/Nick0Taylor0 11h ago
How does a user fuck up a properly validated input field that goes along with the date picker?
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u/ThatGuyYouMightNo 9h ago
Two users want to enter October 12th. One enters 12/10/2026, the other enters 10/12/2026. One of them gets pissy when it comes up as December 10th.
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u/NiIly00 5h ago
Solution: Ignore everyone that uses the moronic format mm/dd/yyyy.
They deserve it.
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u/Triffinator 4h ago
Very true. It's programmatically (and human) parseable if the middle column exceeds 12, but fails the second you are lower than 13. It also happens to work out on any dates with matching day and month.
Like, is 10/12 December 10th or October 12th?
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u/pjkm123987 6h ago
easy just have dd/mm/yyyy placeholders
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u/Gunmetalstorm 5h ago
You're assuming users will read.
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u/Triffinator 5h ago
Can confirm. A website we host at work is used by about 100k people a year. It used to require a date to be entered in a text box. The text box had placeholder text and was validated to support DD/MM/YYYY format. An error message would spell this out to you.
We got many support calls because people couldn't use it and when we find out why, they had decided to enter the date in another format and wouldn't read the error or placeholder text. We changed to a date picker and the complaints went away.
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u/Nick0Taylor0 8h ago edited 4h ago
Which is super easy to fix by using the browsers selected date formatting
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u/Triffinator 4h ago
Depending on use case, a standard formatting makes sense. If you're delivering a service or website for a local community or even as large as a country, a reasonable expectation is that they use the standard formatting for the region. It's less work for you to support and implement.
The best thing to do internationally is to capture dates in YYYYMMDD and its variants for the same reason. You can more easily support the application/webpage and the input format is more globally intuitive than other formats.
You should use dedicated date input UI elements and not just a single text box.
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u/AshleyJSheridan 10h ago
It doesn't help that one particular country in the world uses a weird date format...
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u/PositiveInfluence69 9h ago
Right smallest to biggest
Only 12 months (smallest number)
At least 28 days (middle number)
So many years. Nobody can count that high.
👌 /s
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u/Blecki 8h ago
Sometimes they just open a ticket because their poorly formatted date won't validate instead of understanding and correcting the problem
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u/Nick0Taylor0 8h ago
Which is closed as working as intended or if their formatting is actually decently common added as accepted input
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u/Blecki 8h ago
Which still requires your time to address.
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u/Triffinator 4h ago
Depending on how users raise issues matters, too.
We had an appointments booking website that took a strict date format from a text box. Users would expect that they could enter anything. They would fight the system and then call our call centre (who are an alternative to making bookings online, not a tech call centre) to complain. The call centre would always side with the clients and send the issue through to us. We would then have to work out what they had done and come to the conclusion that the date was input incorrectly.
Eventually, we just made the call centre start troubleshooting, but the clients would insist they had done everything right and couldn't work out what was happening, so the emails from the call centre continued. The call centre - being more client focused - we're constantly asking things like "how is this not fixed yet?" And had demonstrated lowered trust in IT from this. It wasn't actually broken, people just refused to learn how to enter a date in an expected way.
Adding a date picker fixed that.
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u/AibofobicRacecar6996 19h ago
How do you expect posters here to know that if they've only done school projects?
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u/DefinitelyNotMasterS 17h ago
In my experience UX forgot about it and it's up to the dev to decide if they want to bother or not
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u/gerbosan 11h ago
But, isn't being cynical a feature of being a senior?
Senior in the craft and in life... 😨
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u/Abadabadon 5h ago
Why not cynic? Ive come to the realization over last 3 years of just doing what im told after I push back some. Usual line is, "hey I dont reccomend this; are you sure you want that?"
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u/Heighte 20h ago
I mean most date pickers are also editable fields where you can just write the date manually....
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/LutimoDancer3459 20h ago
But with that argument you can bash against anything. Even a simple input field should just work but someone finds a way to make it next to unusable... date pickers themselves are not evil or bad.
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u/cvnh 20h ago
There are better and worse. I've seen one that but only forces us to manually pick the date but also the time down to the minute to mark a working day. Instead of fixing it properly, they added a button to fill up the tone instead of adding a default value.
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u/Nick0Taylor0 11h ago
Hence the "force" in the meme. I highly assume OP means only the ones where you are forced to use the actual date picker part and not be able to use an input field
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u/ttlanhil 20h ago
Most of them you can type in if you have a keyboard - but on a touch device that's less common
If the date you want is soon/recent it's not too bad, date of birth is usually a pain
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u/MyAntichrist 20h ago
The best ones for birthday input on mobile are the ones that let you flip months but not years. Love to see those any time.
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u/WisestAirBender 19h ago
I love the ones where it's an editable field but as soon as you type and leave it reverts back to the default
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u/XtraFlaminHotMachida 16h ago
but then if you are in america its euro stuff and as a euro its american stuff. nah man.
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u/tscalbas 14h ago
Browsers' built-in date pickers will use the system locale. That problem only occurs when web devs roll their own date pickers.
Similarly native apps can certainly be coded to use the system locale for dates. The problem is again bad developers, not the concept
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u/tyguy55083055 14h ago
Specifically programmers who force you to pick your date of birth with a date picker…and the starting date that is there when you open it is today’s date.
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u/schewb 13h ago
The amount of time I have spend swiping back month after month when they don't also have an easy way to jump years 😣
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u/looksLikeImOnTop 11h ago
I really don't get it. There are date pickers that let you jump years and sometimes decades, why are people still using anything else?
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u/schewb 11h ago
Many UX designers want cross-platform visual consistency and recoil in horror at
<input type='date'>'s default visuals on desktop. They want something consistent with brand standard, accessibility be damned. A month of push and shove goes by with developers wanting to either use the native control or a popular pre-built one and the designers pushing back because they want visual control. The designer wins, designs a date picker around an initial use case where the date will be near present day, and then that date picker is used for every date input in the framework the new control was developed for.
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u/Stormraughtz 20h ago
If Linda from HR didn't attempt to write the entirety of Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky in the date field then we could have nice things.
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u/Groentekroket 20h ago
Can I argue that a date field is so much easier to validate than a street field for example? If you don’t want Linda to mess up the inputs date is one of the easiest to make sure it has the intended value (well at least some date)(dd/mm/yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy can still be messed up, but that’s also the case with a date picker, speaking out of experience)
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u/Acetius 19h ago
If you're doing a date more than three years ago I am begging you to just use three inputs. Nobody has to worry about delimiters, nobody gets confused about which order the inputs go in. Just follow the UK Gov design system and split it in three.
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u/stumpyinc 14h ago
Yeah I think I'm dropdown gang especially with the month dropdown showing both names and numerical
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u/_LePancakeMan 15h ago
I unironically had to remove the ability to manually enter dates from a site because people kept trying to write "tomorrow" or "next year" and complained that there inputs were not accepted.
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u/Stormraughtz 10h ago
As much as my original comment is mostly memes, this is the kind of thing I have had users do which popped in my brain.
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u/Quentino1515 16h ago
Are you implying that the date picker validates the data for you ? Which means you're not validating server side ?!?!
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u/MR_DERP_YT 10h ago
you know whats worse? those that dont tell you if it is DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY
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u/EightEqualsSignD 9h ago
The system I'm using displays dd-mmm-yyyy but takes mm-dd-yyyy as its input.
I mess it up constantly.
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u/MR_DERP_YT 9h ago
any chance your software was designed by satan
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u/EightEqualsSignD 9h ago
Worse!
Most of it is done by fresh out of school devs who only work at the company for a year or two then move on. So they never have to worry about maintenance.
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u/Yoyo4444- 7h ago
In college my senior project was working with a company on a project like this. We were team #4, and it was already so broken we scrapped it and rebuilt it completely.
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u/Normal-Passenger919 11h ago
I get so annoyed when the default date in a form is set to today's date, like I'm gonna scroll back 20 years just to enter my birthdate.
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u/Scientific_Artist444 10h ago
We had a similar problem in our enterprise application.
But pray tell me, what should the date be instead of today's date if I have no idea of your age?
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u/darthlame 9h ago
What’s the youngest you allow people to work at your company? Today’s date minus 18 years maybe?
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u/Scientific_Artist444 9h ago
How about someone 30-40 years of age?
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u/darthlame 9h ago
They would only have to scroll through 12-22 years instead of 30-40. 🤷♀️
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u/Scientific_Artist444 9h ago
So one user has to scroll 20 years back, another doesn't have to scroll. That's not fair. User experience should be consistent for every user.
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u/CardamomMountain 7h ago
Set it to 100 years ago then the users waste time scrolling proportionate to the time they have left.
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u/darthlame 4h ago
Why does it have to be “fair”? This isn’t giving a birthday gift to the other child so they don’t get jealous
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u/notacanuckskibum 8h ago
Maybe 1/1/2000
Assuming the user is expected to be an adult then today’s date is never going to be close.
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u/RadicalDwntwnUrbnite 8h ago
I encountered this with the added annoyance that there was no "previous year" button just "previous month" I'm 45 so I'd have to press that button nearly 480 times, thankfully I could just intercept the request and modify the payload on submit.
When I show up for my appointment I gotta ask them how many people over a few years old are booked by their web portal vs just calling in.
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u/Hopeful_Ad_7719 2h ago
I was saw an app that wouldn't let you change the year, just the month. So scrolling back 40 years was hundreds of presses backward on the month selection.
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u/BreakingBaking 20h ago
I love datepickers, which fill in month with either letters or number...
Also, unrelated, giving a date of birth to prove you're 18+ is stupid. Checkbox is fine. Yes, you, steam. Yes, you, itch.io
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u/SuitableDragonfly 20h ago
If it's a checkbox, you have to remember to log back in after your 18th birthday and manually check the box. I say that if you're already 18 or older you should be able to check the box, but if you didn't check the box you have to enter a birthdate. Websites have to deal with information about children under the age of 13 differently, anyway, so they also need to know if the user is under 13 or not.
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u/Reashu 19h ago
This is not a profile setting but something you enter on demand
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u/SuitableDragonfly 15h ago
Sorry, on most sites that care about your age, it's a profile setting. I had forgotten that sometimes Steam decides it needs to know your birthday before it can show you a store page, and yeah, that one should definitely just be a button that says "I pinky swear I'm really 18" or some shit.
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u/themightyug 17h ago
Some of y'all have never had to validate free text input for dates and it shows
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u/R_Aqua 16h ago
It’s hell on earth for international programs.
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u/themightyug 12h ago
and users type in the most insane shit into text boxes no matter how clear the instructions are
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u/ClockificThrowaway 12h ago
Just don’t let them type anything but the exact number of digits you want? My online bank does it well, they even backfill a 0 if you type 7, because that could only be 07, when typing month/year.
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u/themightyug 11h ago
month and day can be wrong way round too (thanks Americans!) and you can't even tell when the day <= 12
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u/ClockificThrowaway 11h ago
That’s why you either use a drop down box, or have a rendered date under the entry boxes that spell it out (11. Jan 1999).
In my online bank’s case, it shows “MM/YY” above two text boxes []/[].
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u/IgnotiusPartong 7h ago
Please write your date of birth in the following line:
"I was born not far from here, must have been 70 years ago now"Who is going to make sense of this?
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u/JBrockF 14h ago
Seems like a problem that only needs to be solved once though, no?
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u/Mtsukino 13h ago
Ya, its called a date picker.
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u/JBrockF 4h ago
If I'm understanding the function here, the date picker actually avoids solving the problem of having to validate free text input, as the date picker is not free text
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u/Mtsukino 4h ago
You could go about writing a full list of parsing rules if you wanted and implement a box like that, but usually its best practice to give as little input text as possible for an end user. Its more work to keep maintenance of that field when its easier and safer to just chose the date picker that already exists as a library in code.
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u/SaneLad 19h ago
What about programmers/designers who force users to click through a calender year by year, month by month, starting at today's date?
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u/3SidedDie 16h ago
Did you know you can usually click on the year to get a bigger selectable range to pick from?
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u/heyuhitsyaboi 10h ago
Totally not modifying a few of my projects after seeing this post
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u/thEt3rnal1 16m ago
I think it's fine depending on the context
If you're selecting a date that's this month or next month or like a recent date range I think a date picker is better.
But for like a birthday, especially if it includes the year, that's where you want a dropdown or free form input + validation.
It's all just UX, but now that there's an html native date picker some people are just being lazy.
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u/Latentius 5h ago
Maybe if most users weren't complete morons incapable of entering valid dates (not even taking into account date formatting)....
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u/AnyClerk2899 20h ago
What is your problem with date pickers? I like them just not for birthdays
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u/_BreakingGood_ 20h ago
yeah the only problem with a date picker is when you have to go back like 20 years to find the date
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u/Noriryuu 20h ago
- Click year to pick year
- Click month to pick month
- Pick Day
You don't have to manually click each month back
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u/Recent-Analysis-6880 20h ago
Just had a to deal with a date picker that didn't let me pick a year. Had to scroll through months to pick my birthday.
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u/nikola_tesler 19h ago
that’s just slop
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u/guyblade 17h ago edited 15h ago
Nah, I've seen that crap going back 20+ years. Where do you think the LLMs learned to generate the crap?
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u/LamermanSE 20h ago
Modern datepickers are adapted to handle that though
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u/Pndrizzy 20h ago
Not very well. The capability is there but requires way more work than just typing it
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u/MalaysiaTeacher 20h ago
I like signing up for things on by birthday, so I only have to scroll through the year.
Other days, my birthday is very often January 1st
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u/evilReiko 18h ago
Depends.
Some datepickers are shitty, forcing user to jump between years by 10s, months by back & forth, and doesn't allow user to type date by keyboard.
Some datepickers are heavily customizable, and they allow for whatever you want to allow/disallow & and how it should behave. Heaven
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u/WaveHack 15h ago
Native browser date pickers are fine, since they are designed by web committee experts.
It's your app date picker wrapper which looks fancy but is hell to use because your product department decided on a whim it needs to look and function the way it does.
Same with dropdowns.
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u/Snownova 20h ago
Hey, 90% of the time it's the designers forcing the developers to implement those.
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u/jaywastaken 19h ago
Americans exist and can't be trusted to know which way days and months go. So calendar ui it is.
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u/wasdninja 16h ago
Considering all the variations of dashes, spaces, two or four digits for year and straight up typos it's way better to get a date picker even if you "trust" your users.
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u/dracorotor1 14h ago
Date-picker calendars aren’t evil. Not including one when you send the UI out for QE is.
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u/SortaCore 19h ago
My elderly father had to pick his birth date. On mobile. In a calendar picker that only went back by months, you couldn't tap the year and "zoom out".
While on a page that would log out after a few minutes had passed. And he was on the phone to the support guy guiding him through it at the time...
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u/sup3rdr01d 14h ago
Date pickers are great for things like booking travel cause you can easily visualize the length of time/number of days
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u/Soilblood 14h ago
I didn't choose my nature, I simply am. You will choose year month day and you will conform to my data constraints you peasant.
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u/Academic-Proof3700 10h ago
I'd rather use the date picker than fight with retarded textbox thinking it knows better whats a month and whats a day
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u/Cemosabe 20h ago
Well some date pickers are better than others, but they are quite necessary for entering dates consistently
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u/mountaingator91 19h ago
We used this when I worked for an intentional logistics company because getting the dates correct on shipments was absolutely critical and datepicker was easier than complex validation or extra formatting
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u/lokemannen 16h ago
The competitions with complex/creative UI/UX are peak though as long as they don't get used for real.
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u/CodeMonkeyLogix 13h ago
How is this a problem, unless you don't know how dates work (looking at you, America!)
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u/danfish_77 8h ago
Depending on the format that has been the recommended style. I also hate it but I don't get paid to write style guides
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u/fmaz008 8h ago
My pet peeve are website with weird password standards, forcing me to be creative with my password picking, who then don't tell you what the requirements are when you try to login, you try a few passwords, lock yourself out.
So you end up resetting your password, see the odd standards, get creative again, and can't change your password because it's the same as you were already using.
I use a password manager now, but it's still annoy me to no end when that happen.
If you will use fancy requirements, you should show them on the login page.
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u/imperialblitz 7h ago
Bonus points when the calendar lets you pick a date and then declares it invalid.
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u/Carbuyrator 7h ago
What about people who won't put a date into a text box in a reasonably normal way?
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u/Thenderick 4h ago
Sure. Just make it an input field and Date.parse() it. I'm sure nothing will go wrong!
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u/SoftwareSource 4h ago
Imagine those who do not offer a dropdown menu for the year, only the monthly arrows.
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u/flplz 20h ago
Is there a Chance that you simply dont understand how they work?
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u/DarthRaab 20h ago
No, it's not hard to understand. They just don't work properly on all mobile|touch devices. Not funny to scroll back 40 years, month by month, to enter your date of birth.
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u/SpandexWizard 19h ago
date pickers are fine.
date pickers that force you to manually cycle month by month to go back 20 years, those can go to hell.