S60 User Experience

September 12, 2006 Lost in contacts Posted by at 08:00 AM | Categories: Applications, Personalization

Hi S60 enthusiasts! I’m Joonas, a fresh addition to the blog contributors. I’ll kick off with one of my favourite applications: Contacts aka Phone Book aka Address Book. The application is vital for me. It’s my vault of contacts, addresses, phone numbers and birthdays. It has replaced my memory. However, it’s not a particularly easy memory to use.

I have some 400-500 entries in my address book. I think that this is a reasonable number of entries, considering that the address book is my primary place to where I collect all of my contacts, addresses, favourite restaurants, service numbers etc.

I was browsing my address book one day, searching for one particular contact whose name and number I couldn’t quite remember at the time. While browsing, I found lots of other entries I had totally forgotten even to exist. Some of them I didn’t recall at all. I also found a couple of double entries - or that was what I first thought. When I examined the doubles more closely, I discovered that they were not doubles, but individuals who just had exactly the same name but different phone numbers, addresses, and so on. I was lost.

There is lots of detailed information you can add (while it is not as easy as it could be) to one entry: name, several different phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses, titles, company names, web addresses, even countries, birthdays, pictures and so on. Browsing these details is slow if you have to check lots of entries to find your target (left soft key to open the options menu, several clicks down to select details for more detailed information than first and last name).

Fortunately I remembered the missing name after some browsing and found the contact I was originally searching for. But what about when you don’t remember the names? You might remember his or her title, company or face? What then? That doesn’t help you much if you don’t remember where to search.

Someone might ask why I don’t use groups to sort my contacts. Good question. Groups might be a wonderful feature. However that feature lacks lots of actual functionalities to make it really wonderful. These are sorting and filtering. Dictionary.com defines the term group like this: a number of persons or things ranged or considered together as being related in some way. Assigning filters for groups would be one way to make those relations. It’s not the only way and there is still a need to set some of these relations manually (like it works now), but filtering and sorting should be there. However, browsing, filtering or sorting an address book is not easy. It is almost impossible if you don’t know the first or last name of your target. Correct me if I am wrong, but these two are the only options you can sort or search your contacts at the moment. Why can’t you use all the metadata you have entered for the entry to sort or organize your address book?

I think we might need a more sophisticated way to browse, sort and organize our contacts. Creating entries could also be easier, but that is a completely different story. Am I the only one who is lost in contacts?

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Comments

Approximately the same problems here although my contacts list is limited to 300 entries and most of those entries are personal so generally I don't have a problem with remembering names.

Having a global search feature (for all data on the device, kind of like Spotlight/Quicksilver on the Mac or the Find feature on Palm) could go a long way to solve your problem if you at least know some detail of the person that you are looking for.

The new devices (like the E-series) all have gorgeous screens, why don't you have the option to actually use that then? Ok, if you are in a hurry and if you know what you are looking for you don't want tiny letters to put more details (like group or company name) in the list but if you are sitting down and trying to find someone of whom you can't quite remember the name this could be pretty helpful.

Contacts is functional and certainly not a horrible application but there is some room for improvement :)

I agree that Contacts does a lot of things right, but quite a few things wrong. The biggest problem is that it just doesn't seem to have been designed with anything beyond basic phone use in mind. Finding a contact and dialling their number is simple. Viewing a contact's postal address - in the format you would use on an envelope - is frustratingly difficult (in fact, it's impossible). Other platforms such as Windows Mobile do this much better.

S60 is now a credible all-in-one phone + PDA platform, especially with v3.0's larger UI and business handset features, so I really think it's time to cast a fresh eye over the basic PIM applications.

Thanks for taking the first step and asking for feedback, Joonas. I hope you get plenty of food for thought!

Exactly my point of view!
The contacts searchfunction is far too primitive.
Please, in the next firmware-update make it possible (at least) to search all the meta data in contacts.
The search function is plain out embarrassing as it is right now. How this has gotten true quality check on a phone as the E61 is beyond me !

Well, I guess this is what we call contact management system. Unfortunately none of the operators or phone manufacturers offer anything of the sort but i know few third party applications which actually offers this basic Value added Service. For an example https://zyb.com. They have build a plateform with a simple interface to primarily secure your phone data but it also helps to manage your contacts as well. Its an online backup service that helps to manage and share your phone data aswell. I was surprised to see that the service does not cost a penny.

Oh just as i was about to check zyb, the site link appears to be dead.

I have probably 1000 entries in my address book. I was also completely lost until I found Alon Contacts Guide. Mostly its a non-user freindly app but it has one feature that my 6600 doesn't have...it shows which contacts have not been assigned to a group yet! I used it to slowly work my way through my address book and group all my contacts together into something that makes more sense. With a large address book it really makes sense to use groups and there is no limit to how many groups you can have so I've made companies into groups

Dani, you have to take the 's' out of URL. ZYB is really a great service, and it's using SyncML which is not that wide-spread (I think?)

S60 Open to new features

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