About reversal from "Thu, July 23" to "July 23, Thu"

Question

My app needs to display dates in a shortened form.
Each dates needs to include the day of the week as well, but I want to put more focus on the date itself. So, I'm considering a reverted version of dates, as shown below:

This year: Jul 23, Thu
Another year: 7/23/19, Thu

I put the day of the week to the end because it is just extra information and the date itself much more matters.
But, because this is not a typical date format in English, I'm worried that users might feel confused.
How do you think? Is this inversion acceptable? Or should I strictly follow the standard English date format?

Lionel Rowe · Answer

Option 1: Parentheses
"July 23 (Thu)" is acceptable to English speakers and preserves the desired order. Something similar will work in most (perhaps all?) languages, if localization is a concern.
Option 2: Tooltip on hover
Another, slightly more involved, alternative is to offer more info about the date with a tooltip on hover. This is quite a common pattern for dates. The existence of the tooltip could be indicated with a dotted underline under the base text.
For example, the base text could be "July 23", with a tooltip showing "Thursday, July 23, 2020".
If it's a web app, however, note that title attributes aren't available on touchscreen devices, so you'd probably want to use a proper tooltip library instead.

About reversal from "Thu, July 23" to "July 23, Thu"

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