As I was looking at the Calendar and figuring out ow to make it better, I noticed that Contacts i a mess as well. So I thought about looking at it as well. And this is what I came up after 15 minutes:



As you ca see, it's a lot simpler than the current design. Instead of having four areas (Address Books, Distribution Lists Contacts and details) competing for attention, it has just three. Address Books and Distribution-lists have been merged in to one. And in my mockup I talk of "Personal Group" as opposed to "Personal Address Book". Idea is that Personal Address Book is just one group among others. You could mail all the people in your own group, by simply typing "Personal Group" are the recipient.

Of course we could also talk of "Personal Address Book", "Marketing Address Book" and so forth. But the point is that there would not e separate Address Books and Distribution Lists, they would be merged.

I also think that the groups would be handled by tags. That is, all contacts are added to the "All Contacts"-group, and user could give each contacts tags, and it would be added to relevant groups based on those tags. For example, if the user tags a contact both as "marketing" and "management"; it would be part of those groups automatically. Of course new groups would be created automatically, if the user creates a new tags and gives it to some contact.

Toolbar would have a whopping one button. I looked and looked, but I couldn't really figure out what other stuff should be there. Anyone? Of course there would be a way to add/remove fields from the "details"-section, so you could list (for example) several addresses for each contact, if needed. It could also have a space for the contacts picture.

Of course there would be a search-bar for searching through the contacts.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Overall it really seems nice. The tag idea is really good, would help to order much better.
What i think is missing is the sidebar with the starting characters. Imagine a contact list with thousands of contacts. Maybe i was to lazy to tag all my contacts and i am in the all contacts view. Now i simply want to see all contacts with a starting J.
Just an example, but i guess in some situations this sidebar is really useful.

neverendingo wrote:What i think is missing is the sidebar with the starting characters. Imagine a contact list with thousands of contacts. Maybe i was to lazy to tag all my contacts and i am in the all contacts view. Now i simply want to see all contacts with a starting J.

Do you mean something similar that is used in for example iPhone? In the iPod and contacts-section there is a list of letters on the right-hand side of the list, and if you click on any particular letter, it jumps right to that letter.

You can also see this jump bar in the current kaddressbook version. But AFAIK it is not enabled by default.

neverendingo wrote:Now i simply want to see all contacts with a starting J.

My first thought was to just type a "J" into the search field. But probably this should give me all contacts containing a "J" instead of those starting with "J"...

michael4910 wrote:

neverendingo wrote:Now i simply want to see all contacts with a starting J.

My first thought was to just type a "J" into the search field. But probably this should give me all contacts containing a "J" instead of those starting with "J"...

For advanced users it would be could, if you can type ^J to achieve this. This would require a option in the settings to switch to regex search mode.

michael4910 wrote:

neverendingo wrote:Now i simply want to see all contacts with a starting J.

My first thought was to just type a "J" into the search field. But probably this should give me all contacts containing a "J" instead of those starting with "J"...

the two things would achieve more or less the same thing. Difference would be that one methid reies on the keyboard, while the other is mouse-driven.

@msoeken: regex mode would be quite impressing, but I think there are not many people out there that have ever heard of regular expressions, so this wouldn't help them a lot... ,-)

@Janne: yes, it would be almost the same, but for me: I wouldn't want to spend so much space on clickable letters - I won't need it that much.
By the way: How would such a sidebar look like in a chinese (for example) system?

michael4910 wrote:
@Janne: yes, it would be almost the same, but for me: I wouldn't want to spend so much space on clickable letters - I won't need it that much.

But someone with lots of contacts could

By the way: How would such a sidebar look like in a chinese (for example) system?

I have no idea