[runroader]

I've climbed this mountain of madness trying to calculate working hours elapsed before. It was easily the project I messed up on more than any other in my career. I'm glad I did it, I'm glad I learned a lot, and I hope to never have to work on something like that again. I'd rather spend the rest of my career untangling double & triple encoded character set problems.

The biggest problem is that if even programmers - who know this is hard, and has a lot of corner cases - mess it up, expect your requirements to be very very wrong with regards to special cases.

Come up with a list of example cases and ask what the expected output should be; but not just the corner cases, the normal examples too. There's a good chance even basic requirements regarding timezone conversions have not been thought about, or are wrong. Like the earlier post said, humans really only think in local time and for short periods in the future or past. Any conversion whatsoever can end up being pretty unintuitive (even if it's right).

If it has to do with scheduling, BE EXPLICIT. Show both (or more) local times and dates and let the user pick a time for either location. Maps with pins can be a very helpful UI affordance