Comments on: Scheduling around the world: www.doodle.com

By: Reto @ Doodle

Reto @ Doodle — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:51:30 +0000

@ Brian Cashman,

Thanks for the feedback. Fully agree with you. We’ll have it fixed in one of our upcoming releases.

Reto

By: Brian Cashman

Brian Cashman — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:29:32 +0000

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.

By: Reto @ Doodle

Reto @ Doodle — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 07:54:00 +0000

@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.

By: SCK

SCK — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:29:33 +0000

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.

By: Reto @ Doodle

Reto @ Doodle — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:38:41 +0000

@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

By: Rachel

Rachel — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:32:07 +0000

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?

By: Reto @ Doodle

Reto @ Doodle — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:11:29 +0000

@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

By: Helge

Helge — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 08:53:04 +0000

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").

By: mn

mn — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:02:14 +0000

Bonnie, thanks for your comment. We’ll certainly look into this in the future.

By: Bonnie Robinson

Bonnie Robinson — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:57:49 +0000

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!