from Hacker News

A better way to display museum hours (2017)

by artpi on 1/21/22, 12:05 PM with 26 comments

  • by dlkf on 1/22/22, 7:43 PM

    Mostly good advice, particularly regarding the use of visuals. But this is flat-out wrong:

    > The TUE CLOSED is the most dominant element - the info that is least important and most negative is the focal point.

    This is among the most important information. Travelling to a museum during - what are normally - peak operating hours only to learn that it is closed on that day of the week is a far worse UX than any possible formatting of operating hours.

  • by artpi on 1/22/22, 7:58 PM

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    - Accessories for medical arm slings: https://www.jamesrobertwatson.com/slingaccessories.html

    - How to make elevators more user-friendly https://www.jamesrobertwatson.com/elevatorbuttons.html

    - Better layouts for queue lines https://www.jamesrobertwatson.com/quelines.html

    - Better rest area signage https://www.jamesrobertwatson.com/restareasigns.html

    - Better table numbers https://www.jamesrobertwatson.com/tablenumbers.html

    - Travelpants https://www.jamesrobertwatson.com/travelpants.html

  • by bena on 1/22/22, 6:56 PM

    While I do agree that having each day have its own line is better. I'm not 100% sold on the variable length bars.

    Great, I can see the place is open later on Thursday (for example), but how does that information alone help me? It doesn't tell me the time or even in relation to the other days how much later it would be open, all I know is "later". Sure, if I knew my schedule prevented me from getting there before a certain time, I can begin by looking at the latest time, but it still doesn't tell me if the days with earlier closings would still be acceptable. So no matter what, I'm still checking all the days for closing times.

    Often the case is I know I have a certain day off, so I'd want to check the place's schedule for that day so I can plan around it.

    I'd also lead with Saturday/Sunday as the weekends are the days most people would likely have off.

  • by divbzero on 1/22/22, 7:04 PM

    I like this, but couldn’t this be simply “A better way to display open hours” in general? No need to limit it to museums.

  • by extra88 on 1/22/22, 9:30 PM

    The home page uses a frameset! That may be why he didn't notice the museum hours article has a messed up page title: <title> <meta name="description" content="A better way to display museum hours"> </title>

    As for the actual content, listing each day of the week instead of grouping days with the same hours is definitely an improvement. Using just a letter for the day of the week is harder for people less English-literate and translation software won't be able to do anything with it, unlike the "before" examples, especially the ones that use the full words instead of abbreviations. Museums often have a lot of international tourists visiting.

    The vertical format is much harder to make accessible to screen reader users but the article doesn't have any alt attributes on the images so he's not considering that. It's also harder for Google and other tools to parse to present accurate answers when people search for "museum name hours."

    Having the hours in bars with lengths that vary based on how long they're open and the bar's position being based on opening time might be a useful enhancement to displaying the opening/close hours.

  • by nicbou on 1/23/22, 9:23 AM

    This is not an improvement. What if the business opens twice in a day, as most restaurants do? What if the business closes in the wee hours of the next day?

    This design is not self-evident. It would take me a second just to know what I'm looking at. It's read top to bottom, against the usual left to right. Two days have the same label (as in many other languages). The design with half hours is unreadable without zooming in. Nobody writes time horizontally and vertically at the same time.

    Besides, the original schedule is just text. You don't need technical assistance to put it on your WordPress webpage.

    I like Google Maps' simple approach: one line for each day, starting with today, with the full day label and plain English opening hours.

  • by fjd on 1/22/22, 7:27 PM

    This reminds me of Edward Tufte’s work on Information Design. His books and lectures go into all sorts of problems like this.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_design

  • by gpvos on 1/22/22, 6:45 PM

    I once made a paper insert to stick with my library card on which I had drawn the weekly opening hours of the couple of library branches that I used at the time, all together on one chart, each library hatched or shaded differently.

  • by rrauenza on 1/22/22, 7:21 PM

    I keep trying to figure out a way to display time of use PG&E schedules... This seems like a good start!

  • by croisillon on 1/22/22, 7:29 PM

    a lot of shops in Lithuania have a small diagram on their door to explain their opening hours, usually with a design related to the product they sell

  • by dang on 1/22/22, 11:31 AM

    This is fun, but it usually leads to better discussion if you pick the most interesting page from a list and post that instead. If you want to nominate one, we can change the URL at the top.

    https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

    Edit: artpi suggested the museum hours page, so we've changed to that from https://www.jamesrobertwatson.com/.

  • by suyash on 1/22/22, 7:19 AM

    inspiring work and thoughts, favorite was the 6 suit deck of cards :)