in Platform Updates

Time change in software is done wrong

Bartosz Olchówka in UX, on October 29, 2014

Time change in software is done wrong

Last weekend, most European countries switched back from Daylight Saving Time by moving back their clocks by one hour. People in the United States will do the same on November 2.

All modern software solutions adjust the time automatically. However, it turns out that the process of changing the time is not easy enough for the end-users.

When I woke up last Sunday, the first thing I did was to check the time. Even though I knew that my iPhone adjusts the time on its own, I still had little doubts if it really does. I remembered the famous iPhone bug which caused the alarm to ring one hour late.

And on that Sunday morning, my iPhone did not tell me that it actually moved back the clock by one hour.

So I opened my Mac to make sure the time is correct. But how should I know that the time on OS X is also properly adjusted? Same as the iPhone, my Mac didn’t even mention the fact of updating the system clock.

I ended up opening Google and searching for “time in Poland”. Gotcha! I could finally confirm that my iPhone and my Mac actually display the correctly adjusted time.

It’s really surprising that such user-oriented products as iPhone and Mac do not tell the obvious. One simple message confirming the time change would effectively prevent the users from getting confused.

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