Scheduling around the world: www.doodle.com
As of today, Doodle is accessible at www.doodle.com. The new domain does not change any of Doodle’s current services, but emphasizes its international orientation. Doodle is already available in 25 languages and supports scheduling across time zones. The language, in which Doodle is displayed to the users, is selected automatically according to their personal browser settings.
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
[...] Comment Congratulations to Doodle, my favorite free meeting scheduling and online polling site; they just got their .com [...]
October 29th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I was wondering if your polls were accessible to assistive technology (screen readers, etc). When I did a check of your sample page I found that there were no labels on your form fields. If this issue is resolved I’d be likely to use this software. Great concept!
October 29th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Bonnie, thanks for your comment. We’ll certainly look into this in the future.
November 27th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Speaking of I18n: One thing you really should look into is the 12 hour clock confusion about noon and midnight. Your “12pm” could easy be mistaken for midnight (as in “12 hours past noon”).
November 27th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
@Helge
Thanks for your feedback. Interesting point. Although in the U.S. 12am stands for midnight and 12pm for noon. The average user wouldn’t be familiar with the definitions from Wikipedia. We will add your feedback to our todo list and investigate it further in the future.
Thanks,
Reto
December 30th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
I see from this post that language is selected automatically according to the user’s personal browser settings. Can someone tell me whether that applies for time zone support as well? If not, how does Doodle select a time zone for users? I just had someone log in and the site read her time zone as Zurich though she is in DC - does this mean her computer is set to Zurich time?
December 30th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
@Rachel
Doodle doesn’t use the same mechanism to select a timezone. What we do is mapping your computer’s IP address to the geo location’s timezone. If that person is connected to the internet from DC, Doodle will select the DC timezone. (I think that’s EST?). But if that person travels to Zurich and opens a Doodle from here it will pick Zurich timezone.
Since you say the person opened the Doodle from DC but it still picked the Zurich timezone, then there must have been a problem resolving her IP address to the corresponding time zone.
Can you please ask her to retry and see whether it happens again?
Thanks,
Reto
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:29 pm
When setting this up, I entered times (in my time zone - Eastern U.S.) and sent the participant link to someone in San Diego. The times did not convert to Pacific Time. How do I get this to work? I’m trying to schedule an international teleconference.
January 26th, 2009 at 9:54 am
@SCK:
Did you enable timezone support when setting up your poll? On the wizard page, where you enter the times, there is a link called “Timezone support”. Click on that the next time you setup a poll and the participants will automatically see the suggested times in their timezones.
Remark: Once your poll is created, you can’t enable/disable timezone support anymore. You will have to recreate your poll.
March 3rd, 2009 at 7:29 pm
I wonder if it’d be possible to clarify the timezone link? It says “with time-zone support” and it’s not clear if you need to click this link to get timezone support or whether timezone support is turned on by default (and therefore clicking the link turns it off). It might be good if the link said (for example), “click for time-zone support” or “time-zone support is not enabled, click here the enable it.”
Since you can’t change the timezone support feature once the poll is created it might be good to say that explicitly.
March 3rd, 2009 at 7:51 pm
@ Brian Cashman,
Thanks for the feedback. Fully agree with you. We’ll have it fixed in one of our upcoming releases.
Reto