TechKnack

Here’s an interesting question: when presenting a list of locations and related timezones for the user to choose from, how should they be ordered?

Having been in the internet for long enough to know my timezone, I was taken off guard when Guru.com presented me with the following dropdown list:

Naturally, knowing my own timezone and expecting the list to be sorted by timezone, I started scrolling down to approximately where my zone would be in the list. As I started visually scanning the list to find my zone, I noticed that there was no order to the timezones. And all this time I hadn’t looked at the location names — oh, it’s sorted by location name.

Fortunately, my timezone is sufficiently unique that I was able to find it without much trouble. But shouldn’t a list of timezones be sorted by timezone?