Contacts : A simple thing made difficult

Design Analysis, By Aseem Agarwal

There’s this thing that happens every time when I carry out these steps on my android smartphone (MotoX). I press the dial button, try to find a number and click somewhere which does not looks like an obvious button and it just dials it up straightaway. That’s so irritating. I mean; its like no matter if I want to edit a contact or look up the exact number to copy it; it will just dial it first. Its like punishing you for pressing at the wrong place. There are many things like this which are irritating in the contacts application on my latest smartphone. Now, apart from all the razzmatazz which makes a smartphone super cool and efficient, you do need it to work like a normal phone. Managing contacts is a key part of that. People have been doing this effeciently one way or the other even when there were no smartphones. Any experience now should try to improve upon that and not really confuse the user leaving him/her puzzles to solve.

With Android (4.4), working with contacts feels just like a puzzle. You have to do many steps to do a finish a simple action and there are misplaced functions at many places leaving you confused. We will analyse the following use cases and list out the pain points or bad design approach that we think could be improved.

Usecases

1. See the list of calls made and received
2. See the list of contacts
3. See list of favorites
4. adding/editing/dial/message an individual contact

Pain point : Navigating between different lists.

This is the first screen when you click the dial button on your phone. It shows the list of favorites. Its not intuitive how to navigate to other lists from the home screen. Its not logically grouped as it sounds. They are all lists; shouldn’t we have an option to group them at same place?. What’s worse is that; the “all contacts” button is tucked away at one corner (top right) and you might have to click twice to get it right. One more point on this is that, it violates a key design principle of giving the user as less as possible to memorise. You have buttons at different places when you can actual group them at one place under a generic looking button signifying lists as depicted below.

Pain point : Inconsistent UI representation.

There’s a point in Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics which says that

“Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.”

This is exactly the case here. From contacts if you have to go to the individual contact you click the image(or the placeholder) but from favorites, you have to click the three vertical dots instead of the image itself. Isn’t that confusing for the user?. Having a consisten a button representation will help people to form a pattern which they can memorize and use it everytime at different places. What’s worse is that if you click on anywhere other than that it just dials the number straightaway as I mentioned earlier.

Bad Design — Lack of discoverability

Don norman in his very famous book on design; Design of everyday things says that

“Two of the most important characteristics of good design are: discoverability and understanding.”

Its important because that’s how we understand a particular product works. To be able to use a feature we must discover it and understand how it works. Here the UI already shows a list of favorites to me, even when there are no favorites. It actually automatically add some based on the frequency of my calls. I actually got to know what exactly this list is used for after days of first using it. Shouldn’t it have been empty and prompt the user to add some favorites. Iam pretty sure I would have used it then and added few numbers just to play around and see how it works!. .

Pain point 4 — Bad signifiers.

A signifier is a clue that you give to the user about a certain action that can be performed. Another point made by Don in the book is

“A product should have signifiers which are intuitive enough to make a person realise the use of it.”

The picture above depicts that the number itself is a button against actual event. This is a very bad signifier. People generally don’t perceive a written phone number as an action. A symbol is a better signifier and feels like a natural action people would easily understand and relate against a number. Reversing it here seems ridiculous. Even if we think logically, the frequency of a particular contact having more actions than numbers is more. So it makes sense to have actual actions as button against individual number. An image below show what a better design would be like.

Bad Design : Slow to perform frequent actions.

If I want to copy a number and send it to someone or just copy to clipboard; (a common use case that I generally perform); I have to perform at least four steps;

1. open the list,
2. open the contact dialog 1,
3. open the contact dialog 2
4. then copy to clipboard.

I know copying a contact is not that frequent a case but Iam sure it could have been simpler than that. Another point by Jakob in his 10 point on heuristics points kind of emphasises that

Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.

Bad Design : Redundant UI

This one is the worst. There’s not much to say here; it is just bad design. For an individual contact you have two screen one after the other and in terms of displaying information they are just same. The only difference is number of actions that both have. There is no reason why there can be only one to get the job done.

The above discussion on the pain points and bad design have proven that the contacts feature on latest android violates a lot of design principles. Using contacts is a fundamental day to day task people have been carrying out for ages and a smartphone should try to make it better. But in doing that it should follow some standards which people can relate to making the same set of tasks easier. In the process it should also try to provide new features which surprises them in a good way!.