Right, but you don't need "smart people to converge on" an agreement as to whether or not the 2nd of February is a Thursday. That would seem to be pretty well-defined.
Yeah every other travel site seems to at least show you the proper date range. Let's not make excuses for shitty work, a date picker component isn't an NP Complete problem.
Though, it’s interesting to note that once when I took a date picker component and attempted to morph it into a full-blown MacOS calendar, with calendar appointments that slot into different time slots and don’t overlap, I found that that is an NP-Hard bin packing problem.
My comment was not meant to be an apology of any sort at all. Quite the opposite! Not all datepickers are as broken as this one, but that doesn’t mean the situation where everyone keeps reinventing things is a good one.
Well it's likely the client/server time-zone mismatch was the cause here. It could be that everyone at AirAsia, or even the majority of passengers, saw the right dates, and this edge case was simply not considered.
Assuming a timezone mismatch, it wouldn't always show up because the date would have to cross a midnight boundary for the days to be different. Even if we assumed the servers used Malaysia time rather than UTC, that leaves 8 hours in a day where North American travelers could see the right day.
Time zone shenanigans or not, it has nothing to do with UX. 2/2 is not on Thursday, anywhere in the world, period. This is simply an obvious bug and a lack of customer service, not some UI failing because UI is "really hard".
Are you aware that dates does not get influenced by timezones, right?
And not only that:
Thursday was January 31.
Friday was February 1.
Saturday was February 2.
We need to find out the date the original poster actually entered to make the booking. They may have entered 2/2/19. Perhaps the code for the calendar interpreted it literally (as year 0019) while the code to display the date string did a conversion for Y2K.
> Are you aware that dates does not get influenced by timezones, right?
Yeah, but the situation is worse than that. Weeks boundaries are influenced by a locale. What is the first day of the week? Sunday? Monday? I know that in russia a week starts with a monday. I know also that in en locales it is not the case, I was never able to understand english calendars, so the very first thing I do is fixing locale to see a "proper" calendar which I can understand.
Notice that there are no hints where is sunday and where is monday, you make a decision what is what based on data layout in a two-dimensional grid. For example, I read the screenshot in the tweet as Feb 2 is a Friday, not Thursday.
This leads me to a hypothesis what happened with AirAsia. They messed up locale dependant calculation of a week boundary. Like they added 1 instead of subtracting it, or maybe they applied the locale dependant shift of a week bondary twice, or made some other software bug like that.
