I’ve been trying to become a better member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).  They recently reworked their site, so I re-registered for it.  The confirmation email went right to my spam mailbox, which I didn’t see right away.  I just assumed the site was broken.  However I did notice that I started receiving 10+ emails a day from IxDA topics / forums, so I dug around my inbox and finally found my login link.

On the account settings page, I was shown this:

Web applications are hosted on servers that are rarely in the same time zone as you.  This means that any events scheduled using the system will be displayed with the wrong time unless you’ve set your local time zone in your account preferences.  My expectation would be what I find in Microsoft Windows, which is a list one city per relevant time zone and a GMT offset.  Instead I found choices like:

• America/Indiana/Indianapolis
• America/Indianapolis
• America/North_Dakota/New_Salem
• Antarctica/South_Pole
• Asia/Jerusalem
• Atlantic/Reykjavik

We have some U.S. States included, but not all.  Some U.S. cities are listed twice.  Some U.S. cities are so small I’ve never heard of them.  Geography is sorted by Continent or Ocean.  Just an odd taxonomy choice.

Setting my personal timezone is important to me for this site.  The organization hosts events in San Francisco, so I want to make sure I have the right times for them.  Taking a quick look at the screenshot above should quickly tell you that this simple task became complicated, since the default is Chicago (central time).  I eventually spotted Los Angeles after going through the list 3 times, but I doubt others are as patient as me.

Ideally when you use a drop-down menu either all the items should be visible once opened, or the content of it should be so familiar that the user already knows what to expect in it.  An example of familiar content would be a drop-down that contained a list of U.S. States.  Neither of these cases are true for this example.

Another option worth noting is that the “Automatically enable notifications for any groups that I join” was the source of my 224 IxDA spam emails in my inbox.  I quickly unchecked it.

Most people may wonder why this option would be enabled by default if it results in this much spam.  Most usability / user experience members would push for this to be an opt-in setting, rather than an opt-out (for this spam centered reason).  However having worked with a lot of project managers, my educated guess is that there was a fear that if it was opt-in, no one would bother.  (AKA: The community would fail.)  In my experience thoughts like these terrify product managers, like haunting nightmares and cold sweats bad.  So I can understand the thinking, if not agree with it.

With all design choices, I tend to agree with the general practice that you should use established conventions unless your method is significantly better.  I think this design falls under “needs more work”.

Disclaimer: These are my opinions and insights, and are intended to improve the example being studied.  Like all things in life, there’s a good chance I’m just wrong.  So take it all with a grain of salt.