Without contacts, a communication app would be useless. Without well-designed contact interaction, a communication app could be frustrating and confusing. How do we design VoiceEdge to have easy-to-use contacts management?

Contents:

Design an approach to showing and using contacts that makes things easy and organized for the user.

In designing VoiceEdge, one of the team’s design principles was that “contacts are the center of the universe”, meaning that since VoiceEdge was a communication app, contacts would be very important. When I arrived on the team, the contacts feature had been mostly built already, but the Favorites feature was still to be designed and built. My task was to design this feature.

Before beginning my work, I reviewed the requirements I was given for the feature:

• The feature would focus on “ease-of-use”

• Time-to-connect was a big talking point, making sure the Favorites feature reduced the steps and time needed to connect with a contact

First thoughts

People or numbers?

When designing a feature, I always take a look at how the technology we are using will work. My stakeholders were initially of the belief that when a user “favorites” somebody, they would be “favoriting” the person. But in fact, the way a communication app works is that it needs a number in order to dial, to send a message, anything involved in communication. So really, according to the way the technology worked, we needed our Favorites to be actual numbers rather than the person.