Deadlines in days, then hours, then overdue
In dispute management a missed deadline costs real money. Giving the whole product one way of talking about time made it calmer and clearer.
When a cardholder disputes a payment, the merchant has a limited time to respond with evidence. Miss it, and the case usually closes against them. In the dispute workflow I worked on, deadlines showed up in many places: the table, the case header, the action card, and the reminder emails. At first each place described time slightly differently. Some showed a date, some “3d”, some “due soon”.
We settled on one rule for every surface.
The rule
- A day or more left: show whole days, rounded down. “Respond in 5 days.” Rounding down means we never promise more time than there is.
- Less than a day: switch to hours. “Respond in 19 hours.” Hours make urgency concrete in a way “0 days” never could. In the demo the badge also turns amber here.
- Past the deadline: “Overdue by 2 days”, in red. Saying how long ago helps the operations team prioritise.
Drag the slider to watch it change:
- A day or more → days, rounded down
- Less than a day → hours, in amber
- Past the deadline → overdue, in red, with how long ago
Colour is never the only signal
Amber and red help, but the words carry the meaning. Someone who can’t tell amber from green, or who reads the email in plain text, still gets “19 hours” and “overdue”.
Small details that mattered
- Show the actual deadline on hover or nearby. “5 days” is easy to scan; the full date and time is what people check before acting.
- Use the same words in emails. A reminder email that says “respond in 19 hours” should match what the merchant sees when they click through.
- Edit with limits. Operations could extend a deadline, but only within the network’s window, so the UI capped the date picker instead of trusting a free text field.