A better way to display museum hours (2017) | Hacker News Reader

A better way to display museum hours (2017)

jamesrobertwatson.com

134 pointsartpi26 comments

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.

It only really needs to be so emphasized there because of the format of the other days, where multiple were grouped together. So you might misread that and think the museum is open.

The author's suggestion of listing out every day individually makes it clear even with the closed day is less visually heavy, because the diagram is simply easier to read.

I agree with everything you say, and I agree that the proposed revision in that section is a lot better than the original. I just disagree with the claim that the fact that they're closed on Tuesdays is unimportant. It's extremely important, and any good design should communicate this unambiguously.

James Robert Watson has some other amazing inventions on his site:

- 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

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.

> So no matter what, I'm still checking all the days for closing times.

The proposed format makes this process faster and easier. Once you have read the closing time of one day, you can immediately infer the closing time of all days of the same length.

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.

Why is this being downvoted? This is such a good point.

It doesn't work for businesses like restaurants that are open only during blocks of time covering lunch and dinner hours.

It's not a-priori obvious that this is true. You could adapt the author's style to that case (maybe each vertical column would have a post-lunch grey zone) and then argue the pros/cons.

Even if it turns out this method doesn't work for restaurants, it would still work for stores, offices, libraries, etc.

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.

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.

> What if the business opens twice in a day, as most restaurants do?

Most restaurants in most towns and cities in the United States do not open twice a day.

And for those who do... the suggested design works just fine? Why wouldn't it work?

There is more than one country.

> And for those who do... the suggested design works just fine? Why wouldn't it work?

It would become even harder to read. A simple "10-14, 18-23" does just fine.

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

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.

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

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

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/.

The article on the round backgammon board is great. https://www.jamesrobertwatson.com/backgammon.html

I like the story and photos from initial idea, to prototype, to contract, to production. He doesn't really dig into why it didn't sell well. But it's a good story.

It also looks great and someone (you?) should submit it in the future. Email hn@ycombinator.com if you do and we'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page. But it would be best to wait at least a few weeks, maybe even a few months, to let the hivemind caches clear.

Oh, I made a copy of that board (using cardboard, then SVG) to play, cause I like Backgammon. The circle shape gives a better view, IMO, for strategy.

Thank you dang for managing this community with such care!

And on a weekend morning when he should surely be doing something else with his time :)

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

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