“Clock of the long now (prototype)” by piglicker (CC-BY-NC-ND-licensed from Flickr)

One of the democratic software tools mySociety has built is an online petitions tool for use by governments. We built the first version for the British Prime Minister’s office, and now it is used by a variety of British local governments.

When a user wants to make a new petition, they fill in a web form, containing the petition details.

During this process, a user must choose when they want their petition to end.

The question we are exploring today is this: what’s the best way to ask for that information?

From a developer’s point of view, the end of a petition is obviously a date. This is because the petition software really needs to test whether or not today’s date comes after the petition’s end-date. So an easy — and accessible — way to ask for this data would be as a date input, which could even helpfully trigger a calendar pop-up menu or similar widget.

But we don’t do it like that, for a couple of reasons, both of which you might miss if you were to build this from scratch. Instead, we ask:

For how long would you like your petition to accept signatures? (e.g., “1 month”; maximum 1 year)

That’s not a date input. But why?

The first reason is that the user is thinking about running a petition as something they plan to do for a period of time. Put simply, if you’re asked about your next holiday, you’ll probably imagine what you’ll be doing (“I’m going to spend two weeks lying on the beach”) rather than the end of it (“I’m going to stop lying on the beach on the 25th of August”).

In terms of interface design, this means that users will tend to think about how long something lasts differently than from how a computer or a coder will tend to think about it. The general rule is: even for something as simple as this little web form, if it’s possible to create an interface that matches the way that a user thinks about the world, then it will be less confusing for them than one that does not. Usually this means the system has to be a bit more complicated to program, in order to convert what the user types to what the computer needs.

The second reason that we ask for a duration, not a date, is that in the case of the petition, the user doesn’t actually know when their petition is going to start. Although they’re entering it into the website right now, there will nearly always be a delay before the government approves it. So most of the time, by asking for a duration, we’re avoiding raising this issue at all, and the user simply says what they mean, and it works. A petition with a duration of “3 months” will run for three months, once it goes live. A date wouldn’t survive an unspecified delay like that.

So, we ask for a duration and parse the result to turn it into a date when it goes live… but there’s an extra twist. What if the user really does know the date their petition must end? Maybe it’s a petition about closing the main road for a New Year’s Party, and it’s got to be discussed at the council meeting that’s being held on the 5th of December. Well — OK! If the user puts a date into the duration field, even though we didn’t ask for a date… we accept it. We can do some validation to make sure it’s a sensible date, of course, but basically if someone does puts a date in there, then that’s fine too.

What we hope this has shown you is that even something as simple as asking a user for an end date can be done easily (just use a date input there) or thoughtfully. The system wouldn’t break if we did it the other way. But making things as convenient as this means that we are allowing users to focus on the thing we’re trying to let them do, instead of drawing attention to how we are making them do it.