We tend to go dogmatic on date pickers. Gotta use them everywhere someone asks for a date. That's the problem right there.
It's like the classic "text field versus dropdown for state abbreviation." There are a lot of dates people prompt for that the user KNOWS and can type faster than they select. The obvious one being "enter birthdate" as part of account creation processes.
The "comprehensive" date pickers with mini calendars and things are more usable, IMO, when you're interested in a relative date. What you really want is "next Tuesday" and you need the mini-calendar to convert that to "2022-10-11". Maybe they can be bypassed by figuring out purpose-built specific solutions to the prompt. Appointment scheduling, for example, might be better suited by showing a list of available slots rather than prompting for an arbitrary date.
It's like the classic "text field versus dropdown for state abbreviation." There are a lot of dates people prompt for that the user KNOWS and can type faster than they select. The obvious one being "enter birthdate" as part of account creation processes.
The "comprehensive" date pickers with mini calendars and things are more usable, IMO, when you're interested in a relative date. What you really want is "next Tuesday" and you need the mini-calendar to convert that to "2022-10-11". Maybe they can be bypassed by figuring out purpose-built specific solutions to the prompt. Appointment scheduling, for example, might be better suited by showing a list of available slots rather than prompting for an arbitrary date.