Sharing contacts through mobiles or tablets is one of the most frequent daily tasks for millions of people. Tough, procedures are still awkward and counter-intuitive, as they involve operations like copying and pasting, This happens because it is not possible to access mobile agendas directly from mobile text messengers. So, we’d better re-think the design of these tools, in order to give clients a better user experience.
Have you ever been in the situation of being standing on a crowded bus when a friend sends you a text message to ask somebody’s phone number? Intuitively, you will probably welcome something like a button somewhere on the screen that allows you to get the desired contact retrieved from your mobile agenda and automatically copied and pasted in the body of your reply.
Unfortunately, there is nothing more distant from this easy and intuitive solution than the design of today’s text messengers. Performing what appears like a simple task at first glance turns to be something that involves a quite long process. But if we reflect on the volumes of contacts shared per day, the importance of this basilar task cannot be underestimated. “It’s the little detail that are vital”(John Wooden). And this is very true in mobile design.
In practice, it is necessary to close the messenger, to open the agenda, to search for the particular contact to send, to copy it, to close the agenda, to open the messenger again, and finally to paste the contact phone number on the body of the reply. Only in some few lucky cases, it is possible to share a contact directly from the agenda, like in iPhone messenger. However, many people simply ignore that this functionality exists.
With this in mind, when I started interviewing users about their ways of sharing contacts in my UX training program, I was not surprised at discovering how many hacks they work out to get round this lack of simplicity in design.
Examples go from the old lady that still writes down on a scrap of paper the telephone number of the desired contact and then type it on the body of her reply, to the younger and more tech-prone video games designer that performs the usual copy and paste operations in order to get her contacts shared. From my little inquiry, it came out that few people knew the possibility to share contacts through their agenda/contact app.
Although, creating a design that allows users to share contacts in an easier and intuitive way should not be so difficult. I imagine something like the possibility to retrieve the desired contact directly from your messenger, without the need to close it and open the agenda. A possible solution could be an ordinary mobile app that integrates text messengers and agendas, so that if I click on an icon on the messenger dashboard, a window/box gets open that allows me to select the contact I need to share:
In the process described through the photo gallery above, Tom’s number is shared in four clicks and less than 10 seconds. Much better than copying and pasting, or writing down the number on a post-it to type it again inside a text message.
Are there solutions like this one available on the market? I have been browsing through the web for that, but honestly I have not found anything useful. Naturally there are some good apps, for example Google Contacts, but they are designed for email sharing, not for mobiles. The tool that has some features that resemble the solution I envisage is Skype, but it does not offer integration with the existing mobile messenger.
So, what to do? In an ideal world, text messenger developers should think of a design solution to integrate their apps with agendas. In an imperfect world, the second best can be make an app for contact sharing that can be integrated with the existing text messenger.
This app — let’s call it “Share Contacts” — should allow users to retrieve, copy and paste their contact details (phone, email, address) without much pain directly into the body of a text message. In this way, the design goes along with users’ natural attitude to look for a way to share their contacts in the messenger, and not in the agenda.
The app should also be integrated as much as possible with the functionalities of the existing messengers. For example, it is not necessary to create a specific procedure to share a contact with multiple users on an iPhone, as it is possible to exploit the existing functionality that allows to send a text message to several recipients.
In this way we can give users a tool that changes sharing contacts into a task that is not only more natural and easy to perform, but also faster and intuitive.
