Noelle
UX · 4 min read

Dates are a UX problem

"Tomorrow" and "two days late" beat "Oct 3" every time — but only if the clock is right.

Aug 6, 2026 · by Noelle

In Tuntas, due dates read the way people talk: "today", "tomorrow", "Thursday", "two days late". Absolute dates appear only when the task is further away.

The hard part was not the copy, it was the clock. A date saved as midnight UTC shows up as yesterday for half the world. Every date in the app is stored as a plain calendar day and compared with today in local (WIB) time.

I also stopped baking dates into sample data. Demo tasks are generated relative to the day you first open the app, so the example never says "overdue since June".

If your interface talks about time, test it at 06:59 in the morning. That is where the bugs live.