alt Hacker News> There are hundreds of ways that different websites ask you to pick dates
Ugh, date pickers. So many of these violently throw up when I try to do the obvious thing: type in the damn date. Instead they force me to click through their inane menu, as if the designer wanted to force me into a showcase of their work. Let your power users type. Just call your user’s attention back to the field if they accidentally typed 03/142/026.
Replies
Is 03/04/2026 March 4th or the 3rd of April?
If you have an international audience that’s going to mess someone up.
Better yet require YYYY-MM-DD.
Date pickers are the absolute worst. It blows my mind we don't have a clean standard by now.
The best is when a site uses the exact same date picker for birthdate as for some date in the future. Yes, I'd love to click backward 50 years to get to my birthdate. Thank you for reminding me how old I am.
Relatedly, scrolling time pickers are also a toss up on mobile. Sometimes a single swipe on the minutes gets you from 12:00pm to 11:50am, sometimes it doesn’t.
I wish the analog clock picker where two quick taps set the hours and minutes (and one more tap for am/pm) was more common.
There's a small rental car company I use sometimes whos date picker is meant for phones and you have to "grab" the wheel and push it up / down do get to your date
Most of these I just say I am 200 years old or so.
I hate how scrolling through a list of years to enter my birthday forces me to confront my mortality
No no, I find that having to click back through almost 40 years’ worth of months to get to my birthday allows for a nice pause to consider the fleeting and ever-accelerating nature of life.