Archiving in UIs | Hacker News Reader

Archiving in UIs

andrewacove.posterous.com

2 pointsandrewacove3 comments

Interesting idea. One I haven't heard anyone bring up before. Could be useful, but I don't know how one could implement this and make it transparent to the user. While the archiving idea makes sense for email, for anything else it might be hard for the average user to get use to this sort of thing. I would love to hear how you might envision doing this while keeping things simple and elegant in lets say, iOS and the Address Book.

Adding archiving to the address book requires two things: A mechanism for archiving a contact, and an input for switching between two separate views of the contacts list: the filtered view (archived contacts hidden), and the full list of all contacts.

I suspect that adding an "Archive" button to the contact info view (to go along with the 'Share Contact' button) would probably suffice for the former.

For the latter, I'd probably use the 'Recents' page in the Phone app as reference. That view has a two-way button at the top to choose between "All" and "Missed" calls. Something similar for "Primary" and "All" contacts (though 'primary' isn't the best word choice) at the top of the contacts view might function well.

Interestingly, there already is support for one other view of the contacts list built into the phone: the Favorites list. The Favorites view forgoes the All Contacts view's A-Z# list, but ignoring that, Favorites is like the white-list version of Archiving's black-list. If every contact started as a Favorite when added, and "archiving" removed its favorite status, you'd have pretty similar results (though that's a pretty poor way to do it).

Those are my initial ideas for it. It would be interesting to see whether archiving could be sufficiently abstracted so as to be easily added to iOS's other default layouts (and whether there would be use in those cases).

Cool. I like you're thinking on this.

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