It’s a well-accepted (but not always followed) unwritten UI design rule that if you show a relative timestamp like “two weeks ago”, it should show the exact timestamp on hover, plus an affordance for non-mouse usage (mobile, people that use keyboard navigation, etc) such as being able to tap/click it.
Saying “1 week ago” or “1 month ago” instead of just saying the date. Dude, I want to know if this happened in August or September.
The fact that venmo does this shit when I’m trying to see what date I paid for something is absolutely infuriating
Both are useful, but at different times to different users. It should be easy to toggle between relative and absolute expressions of time.
The first email was sent on 1/1 but I haven’t heard any update in a month.
I like them as long as they let you tap it to get the actual timestamp. If they’re being used to obfuscate the actual time, it’s just annoying
It’s a well-accepted (but not always followed) unwritten UI design rule that if you show a relative timestamp like “two weeks ago”, it should show the exact timestamp on hover, plus an affordance for non-mouse usage (mobile, people that use keyboard navigation, etc) such as being able to tap/click it.
If you group by time in Windows, it has “a long time ago”…
…in a galaxy far away…
Online it’s even more annoying (to me, anyway), because we have the time element specifically for this kind of thing and no-one bothers to use it.
God I hate any attempt to make the computer personable. Like windows saying “Hi. We’re setting some things up for you”