The goal here was to explore a way to allow folks to see and enter common 🇺🇸 USA and 🇨🇦 CA based time zones quickly.
The assumption here is that ET, CT, MT, PT are more common than any others.
The map is unnecessary but visually engaging. It works to reinforce the selection and provide intuitive feedback that doesn’t require reading long strings of text like America/Indiana/Vevay.
If you do require a very specific time zone, the input also supports fuzzy searching of city, state, country, and province.
The goal here is to provide a better way to enter most time zones, while not sacrificing edge case input.
Try it out yourself and let us know what you think!
Related to this we did some basic investigation into time zone, timezone, time-zone usage.
The hyphenated time-zone came first, time zone settled in as the dictionary standard, and now timezone is taking over but not dominant.
timezone → Everyday, technical, and UI writing — the modern default
Example: Select your timezone from the dropdown.
time zone → Formal, editorial, or dictionary-standard contexts
Example: The meeting is scheduled across three time zones.
time-zone → Only as a modifier directly before a noun
Example: The app handles time-zone conversions automatically.
Google Books Ngram Viewer of these 3 terms.
This leaves the question open, but in Voxie we should pick one and stick with it, with the caveat that time-zone is specific to a particular grammatical context.