In general I try to be strategic, which usually means talking about “big” user experience and staying oriented on the business value of UX.
But every once in a while I just have to point to a particularly bad interaction, then cluck my tongue and wag my finger.
So it is with this time zone setting interaction from Typepad.
What a pain in the tuchas. I actually gave up trying to set my time zone because a) the list is so large and unmanageable and b) I couldn’t find Dallas or Houston, much less Austin. I understand that this service is meant to be used world-wide…but how hard would it have been to lead off the list with “US Eastern (GMT – something)”, “US Central” (GMT – something)” etc?
Oh, and if you go to your Typepad account settings page I challenge you to figure out which fields are required. Hint: you can’t. Because they don’t tell you until after you fail to fill one out. Nice.
