1179322 - Timezone list should be sorted by distance from current location

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::First Time Experience, defect, P3)

Description

[Sheeri Cabral [:sheeri]]

e.g. if you're in Boston, it should start with UTC-4, and above it have UTC-3 and below it have UTC-5 (or similar, switch above and below if it makes more sense)

Comment 1

[:Atoll]

Currently, the timezone list is sorted Alphabetically. This is, theoretically, great, but in practice it ends up being a nightmare to find "the nearest timezone to my location", when I'm in a foreign country and 'Whistler' isn't listed. So offering an option other than alphabetical ("Request timezone from cellular network", "Set timezone automatically", etc) would be great.

See also bug 1179317, where I request that we move geolocation permissions ahead of date/time setting so that we can sort timezones by geographical distance from the user's current location.

Comment 2

[Dave Hylands [:dhylands]]

Isn't sorting by timezone offset and selecting the timezone for the current location approximately the same thing?

Comment 3

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

> See also bug 1179317, where I request that we move geolocation permissions
> ahead of date/time setting so that we can sort timezones by geographical
> distance from the user's current location.

I suspect we wouldn't get geolocation data in time to be useful here, though I could be wrong. We already skip the date/time screen entirely if you have a wifi connection and we've established this already. We then fallback to data provided by the sim card - which *most* of the time should be pretty close. We could certainly try sorting by timezone and see how it plays out. I also think having the GMT offset next to each choice in the picker would be useful. 

I'm marking this as a mentored bug, with the understanding that we would need to UX review a prototype and it might not make the cut.