Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A better way to display museum hours (2017)

jamesrobertwatson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 29 posts

Re: A better way to display museum hours (2017)

#11

Post by kingcharles »

artpi wrote: post #8
dang wrote: post #3

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/ .

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 :)

Re: A better way to display museum hours (2017)

#12

Post by gpvos »

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.

Re: A better way to display museum hours (2017)

#13

Post by bena »

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.

Re: A better way to display museum hours (2017)

#18

Post by dlkf »

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.

Re: A better way to display museum hours (2017)

#20

Post by brokencode »

dlkf wrote: post #18

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…

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.

Post reply on HN