What do you mean, 23 days ago?

“23 days ago.” Oh, thanks. That clears everything up.

Now let me just check the current day and time, subtract 23 days, add 12 hours of uncertainty on either side, and… Nope. Still useless.

Stop doing this. I don’t want to calculate. I don’t want to guess whether you rounded down, up, or snapped to a calendar boundary.

And sometimes the time really matters. If something broke “23 days ago,” did it break at 09:00, or 23:50? Did it happen before or after that deploy?

I just want to know when it happened. Don’t believe me? Here’s a quick test. What do these things communicate?

  • 23 days ago
  • Thu, 27 Mar, 12:26 UTC

I’d say full dates win by a long shot, even when having to fall back to UTC because I don’t know your time zone.

Objections

What UXers say (wrongly):

But time zones are hard!

No. You’re not interpreting third-party input – you know when it happened, and (for serious tools), you know your user’s time zone.

Show it. Respect your user. Let them decide what matters.

“23 days ago” may be fine on a social feed. But in tools for developers, for teams, for actual work? It’s lazy.

But you can hover!

Don’t make me work for it. Don’t make me hover, click, or guess. Just show me the date.

Further reading

I’m not the first to complain, and I’m afraid I won’t be the last. Here are some other voices: