I have lived in Sweden for a handful of years now, and am slowly coming to grips with the country taking a collective break during weeks number 28-31 (yes, figuring out when that is, is a test).
This summer I have (among other things) failed to bring pastries to a party and missed out on a visit to the public library because I thought that Facebook and Google were showing me the current business hours.
I should probably have learned to call ahead by now. However, as a "vän av ordning" (friend of orderliness), and also as somebody who has had the (mis)fortune to work on calendaring tools for a significant portion of my career, I wonder how hard it can be to do it right.
If I were going to develop this, it seems like the easiest (?) approach would be to get the business hours from a calendar. Google can even direct users to create one with their own calendar UI. Now (I'm thinking), the business owner can sit down in January, wrapped in a blanket and with a big cup of tea, and create recurring events for their regular opening hours and exceptions for public holidays, weeks 28-31, and the annual company shrimp-eating jaunt.
My "Enter business hours" UI will consist of a textfield where you paste the URL to the calendar. Then I do some magic CalDAVing and display the correct business hours (or non-hours) for the week. Nobody will be stand outside a closed door with a long face longing for tartes a l'abricot. I am a hero!
But given that I haven't had great luck with looking up business hours on Facebook or Google, I suspect that this is not how their UIs work.
Looking at Facebook business pages, the UI for business hours contains seven rows corresponding to the days of the week, where you can enter start and end of business hours.
In other words, the stressed-out-of-their-skull business owner, who is desperately trying to get everything wrapped up before loading their car to the gills with kids and paraphernalia to go to the summer house has to remember edit the Facebook page on the last day (and the Sunday before they open again). So it's understandable that Facebook business hours might not reflect holiday closures.
Another interesting question is, what do Spanish businesses do? They usually close in the middle of the day, but this UI can't capture that..
With Google, the basic UI is similar to Facebook's, but Google does go further: it is possible to set non-contiguous work hours, and to change the hours on special days. Importantly, you can specify the exceptional days in advance, so entering the data is not time-sensitive. You can even upload the data from a spreadsheet, but interestingly, you can't specify a calendar.
I think we can agree that Facebook makes it too hard for users to do the right thing. Specifying known departures from normal business hours is something that you should be able to do well in advance.
But it also seems like just offering the ability to enter non-normal business hours in advance isn't sufficient, that is, it doesn't make it easy enough to ensure that business owners actually do it. There is something about the Google UI that doesn't sufficiently prod business hours to think of the non-normal weeks.
Which brings me back to the calendar based solution I mused about earlier. Perhaps thinking of business hours as events on a calendar could be the prod that makes the user remember to deal with exceptional dates?
There are other advantages too - if the data for the business hours was a calendar URL, then the business owner would potentially be able to use a single calendar URL for all apps that display their business hours - what a time saver! And if you are suddenly struck by vomiting disease, you wouldn't have to log in to Facebook, Google, et al and change them. You just grab your mobile phone and delete the opening hours on that day and it is hopefully reflected in the UI in the near future. (No connection between vomiting disease and any businesses I may have tried to visit during the summer, I should point out).
But maybe the world isn't ready for exceptions to recurring events?
What do you think? Let me know!
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