Programmers and UI designers should observe there two common use cases: 1: dates close to the current date, such as flight dates, meetings, delivery dates. 2:

Programmers and UI designers should observe there two common use cases: 1: dates close to the current date, such as flight dates, meetings, delivery dates. 2: birth dates and similar (wedding date, start of employment), often a long time ago. For “near future” dates, date pickers are somewhat handy because you can see the day of the week, and glance the number of days compared to other dates. For date of birth, date pickers are useless. You don’t need to pick anything, you will just know it by heart in most cases and you can type it fast enough. Programmers like date pickers, because you can’t choose nonexistent dates, you can’t confuse day/month number, and you can’t enter ambiguous 2 digit years. And they like consistency, so the same design is used for all use cases. Please realize that consistency != usability.