Open Letter to Google: 99 ways to improve Gmail contacts.

The address book is clearly an important application. As a business owner I use it constantly. It’s critical. Microsoft knows this. Apple knows this. Arnold Neustadter knew this in 1958 when he invented the Rolodex. Every business professional knows this. So why doesn’t Google get it?

It seems the Gmail address book was developed with the approach of making the address book transparent and automatic. Unfortunately this idea has turned the address book into nothing more than a cache for the autocompletion of the TO: field. A quick survey of the Gmail users in my immediate circle indicates that they NEVER click the Contacts link. The contacts feature sits ignored and unused. This concept of the automatic, transparent address book fails when matched up to the needs of a business user of Gmail.

Google needs to think of the address book as a separate application, something that can manage all the users contact information and that integrates with the other Google apps. Create a separate Contacts team, because the Gmail team obviously doesn’t realize how sexy an address book can be. Take a good look at the Apple Address book. It’s flexible and very useful.

Even given the recent upgrade to Google contacts, using the Gmail address book is a clumsy and frustrating task. For example, I have two email addresses for the same person and I need to merge the records. This is a common task because Google creates a new contact for each email. I open one record, copy the address, open the other record add a new email, paste, click save and … Gmail refuses to create the record as the email is already present. I cancel my changes, delete the other record and REDO the entry I had already created. Now that I know I need to delete the record first (and pray nothing happens to my copy buffer) the process still feels clumsy. Especially when I have three addresses for the same individual that Gmail has created separate contacts for.

Is there no one at Google to hear my plea? A robust contact management app becomes more relevant now that Android is out. Please, baby please, baby baby, please, please give the address book the attention she deserves.

Here is my short list for improving Gmail contacts:

1. Be flexible. Don’t restrict the user. Don’t have mandatory category fields. An address book application should be as flexible as possible in case it has to sync up with something unexpected. Such as … a PHONE. Don’t make anything mandatory that you don’t have to! Stay flexible. Let people add whatever category they find useful.
2. Give the people the tools. Help them manage the contacts they have. Assume that the contact list will be humongous. Merge multiple contacts into one. Switch view to a “Last,First” format. Search for duplicate entries. Search for records missing names or company names. Search out inactive address that haven’t been emailed in a specified period.
3. Make the workflow easier. Less clicks = moar bettar. Remove the edit button, just click the field to edit. The checkbox selection is nice, but can lead to problems too. For example I edit one record, then I check box another and delete it. Oops, looks like I delete the first record. Ouch. Also; why hide half the contact information until you click the little plus symbol.
4. Make things keyboard friendly. Maybe this is too much to ask of a web application, but I’d like to see it usable with just a keyboard. Or a phone.
5. Let the user look at the data in different ways. A list format where the user can see more fields than just the name. Let the user control which fields are displayed. Let the user control the order they show up in. Let the user click those fields to edit them immediately. Allow the user to sort on: group, company, location, and any field. Add a more ‘fun’ layout showing each contact as a business card.
6. Improve the current layout. The current 3 column layout leaves three quarters of the screen blank while tiny contact information floats at the top of the third column. It’s a blatant rip off of the Apple interface, but not as pretty. It would have been better to steal from Apples feature list instead of it’s interface. You can do better.
   
7. Share with other Gmail users. Although Google docs are nowhere near as powerful as the desktop applications I use, they still have their place in my arsenal. Why? Because of the sharing and collaborative features. Those powerful features should be applied to contacts as well.
8. Publish address book to the web. Be able to export some nice HTML, and publish to a web page. Another big one for collaboration.
9. Export to vCard. This one seems so obvious, it makes me think that it was avoided due to some secret Google bias against the format. In any case this format is well supported by many applications and should be a feature of any address book application. vCards should be able to be sent via email, and to mobile phones. vCards in an email message should be translated into some nice html representative of a business card.
10. Support the hCard microformat. Again, why not utilize the existing standards created by the Internet Mail Consortium.
11. Rule based groups. Apple calls them ‘Smart Groups’. It’s basically a rule based filter that adds contacts to a group based on criteria you set. Such as add anyone with ‘twocell’ in the email address to the group ‘TwoCell’. Or add anyone with anything in the ‘Company’ field to the group ‘Businesses’.
12. Groups should be called labels. Be consistent. And make the labels colorful, just like email.
13. Contacts must be printable. Outlook prints beautiful contact lists. Gmail prints a text file that makes your eyes water.
14. Custom fields. No, the crappy ‘Other’ field doesn’t count. Full custom fields that don’t have a mandatory category applied to them. Hey, how about custom categories too? The three nonsensical categories google gives us now: “Home”, “Work” and “Other”. Who these days considers Gmail or Yahoo webmail a “Home” email. How about “Personal”? And while we are customizing fields we should get to customize the default fields that show up when we enter new contacts.
15. Sync with my Blackberry, Nokia, iPhone, Palm Pilot, Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Address Book and SugarCRM! You want to access your contacts everywhere. You are not wrong for wanting this.
16. Allow others to update their contact information in my book. And allow me to update my information that others have subscribed to. It’s not a new idea, but it’s good.
17. Integrate with the other Google apps. Link address book data to spreadsheets, Gmail messages and documents. Enable mail merges and e-mail merges.
18. Identify and automate common tasks. A good example is the merge contacts problem I identified earlier.
19. Leverage search. Since Google’s strength is search, the product does have basic search built in. But what about searching certain fields? Or show me all addresses missing a phone number.
20. Bring filters to the address book. Gmail’s filters are a power users dream. But filters could be useful for addresses as well. For example: add all those with twocell.com in the email address to the folder/label “TwoCell”.
21. Pull data from Social Networking sites. Grab pictures and other data from Facebook, MySpace and so forth. Pull images from Gravatar.
22. Utilize contact related RSS. Gmail’s current design leaves open a lot of white space. How about filling that space with that contacts latest blog entries, Twitter and other related RSS feeds?
23. Pull from Flickr & similar sites. Create thumbnails of the contacts latest images posted to Flickr and similar sites.
24. News and Stock information. Pull stock and news information related to the contact. This would be especially useful for corporate contacts.
25. Let me control which apps contacts are shared with. When Google share my contact information with other applications such as Google Reader we need to be able to control what contacts are allowed to be shared and with what applications. This should be fairly granular, for example allowing/disallowing contacts with a certain label only.
26. Pull from Flickr & similar sites. Create thumbnails of the contacts latest images posted to Flickr and similar sites.

In conclusion: Love the address book. Stop hating on it. Make it useful and flexible and give it some love, and then your users will love it too.