Right now, the timezone selection screen lists cities from the Olson timezone database, which is user-unfriendly and confusing. The list is long, the user doesn't always know what city they should be looking for, the cities don't correspond to what the user thinks of as timezones, and the groupings of the cities are odd. We should be using what the CLDR calls "metazones". Metazones represent the common names used for timezones by ordinary people, like "Pacific Time" or "Central European Time". The CLDR maintains a mapping from Olson timezones to metazones, and also contains translations for each metazone, so you can look up something like "America/Toronto" and get "Eastern Time" (or "Heure de l'est" in French). I also think it would be useful to present the user with a multi-level selection tree of metazones by geographic region/subregion/subsubregion/etc, rather than putting them all in one long list. Now, the CLDR does not group timezones, but it does group territories, and most timezones correspond to a territory. So, based on the CLDR territory hierarchy, I put considerable effort into arranging all the world's metazones into a user-friendly geographical hierarchy, which you can see the file metazone_tree.txt which I will attach. One disadvantage of metazones compared to Olsen cities is that they don't provide any information about when the user should switch to Daylight Saving time. But luckily, we are a phone, and can get that information from the phone network. (Alternatively, once the user selects a metazone, perhaps we can present them with a short list of the Olson cities that correspond to that metazone and get them to choose one?) This bug will benefit from Bug 1201237.

Whatever we decide to do here, there will need to be a corresponding change in the Settings app.

Improved wording of comment.

+1 to most of this, it sounds like an approach that could yield a much improved user experience. > I also think it would be useful to present the user with a multi-level > selection tree of metazones by geographic region/subregion/subsubregion/etc, > rather than putting them all in one long list. yeah that list is hard to navigate on a phone, it must be harder still (if we use this UI) on a TV or other non-touch device. > Now, the CLDR does not group timezones, but it does group territories, and > most timezones correspond to a territory. So, based on the CLDR territory > hierarchy, I put considerable effort into arranging all the world's > metazones into a user-friendly geographical hierarchy, which you can see the > file metazone_tree.txt which I will attach. > > One disadvantage of metazones compared to Olsen cities is that they don't > provide any information about when the user should switch to Daylight Saving > time. But luckily, we are a phone, and can get that information from the > phone network. We are not always a phone. Apart from other non-phone hardware targets, we also need to run without a SIM card. So the fallback of a much-reduced list sounds like a good one. > (Alternatively, once the user selects a metazone, perhaps we can present > them with a short list of the Olson cities that correspond to that metazone > and get them to choose one?) > > This bug will benefit from Bug 1201237.

Comment on attachment 8656209 [details] metazone_tree.txt Seems like we may want to spin off a separate project and repo for this structure - so we can manage changes outside Gaia and pull in a snapshot as needed.

From UX triage: How can we get traction on this fix? It's a pretty big paper cut that's been around for a very long time. It would be awesome if we could get it done. Please let the UX team know if there's anything we can do to help. Thanks and happy new year!

Firefox OS is not being worked on