The new Google Contacts
gmailblog.blogspot.nl
gmailblog.blogspot.nl
1. Why oh why must we always shove everything into modal dialogs? In the "old" interface, each contact had its own separate page and individual URL. Now that every contact is a "card" that appears as a modal dialog, I can no longer link to it directly, and any card that I'm viewing is lost as soon as I close the tab or navigate away from the page. (Note that I don't necessarily believe that every possible application state should be represented by a URL, but something as discrete as a single contact seems pretty important to me.)
2. The JS captures my Cmd-F / Ctrl-F shortcut and focuses the search bar in the header. To me, this is a huge no-no. Sometimes I just want to find some regular text on a page, not send my every keystroke to Google via a search box that gives me "helpful" page suggestions from Google+.
EDIT: Just noticed that you can still access the browser's built-in search by hitting Cmd-F twice. A bit odd, but at least it's not completely overridden.
3. The show-checkbox-on-hover behavior[1] in the list looks like something's broken. It also doesn't look like a checkbox until you actually click on it[2], which kind of defeats the purpose of a checkbox.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/f3AVYdv.png
[2] http://i.imgur.com/aY5fPl7.png
I don't mean to be super negative. I think there are a lot of nice improvements here too, just a few things that bother me as a "power user".
Why does the search box search Google+ instead of my contacts? I don't even use Google+. This is either a huge bug, or it is insanity. And I thought the Google+ creep was over already. (I can't even use Ctrl-F, because they hooked that to the - currently useless - search box.)
Every contact manager that I have ever used gives me the option to sort contacts by last name. I can't seem to find such a setting here. There are futher sorting issues: Ö should go after O, not Z.
The overview looks nice and clean. When I click a contact with lots of details, and when I click the Edit button, there is just one unstructured mess of a table, crammed into a tiny modal dialog on my 2560x1440 monitor. Compare this to the old Contacts, and you feel inclined to believe that they fired all their information designers, and replaced them with interaction designers exclusively.
Please don't read this as a criticism of Material Design. I really enjoy it on my Nexus, and I think Material enables elegant interactions. But interactions aren't everything. For a product like this, thoughtful information design should be the priority. And I don't even see traces of information design in this preview.
I'd just like to point out that this is not true in the two alphabets that I'm familiar with that use Ö, Icelandic and Swedish. For both of these, Ö is the last character of the alphabet. I don't know how it is for other languages which use Ö but at least for these two the sorting is correct.
I cannot search now thru my old telephone contacts, I get hundert of hits from some random guys which are in some google circles. EDIT. I see now that the non-G+ people are coming at the top.
Edit: also please let us archive contacts. I want to keep someone's number, but scrolling through hundreds of people just to call someone is not ideal.
It looks nice but there are definitely some improvements needed in terms of merging of G+ data with existing data. For example, some of my contacts have two birthday entries, one G+ (which might omit the year) and then one that I have manually added.
I think it's more of a "test drive" scenario for google. It's fully baked but they want to see how it changes behavior on a wider scale where people make choices independent of the organization.
But yeah, Unified Experience matters, blah blah. They were probably thinking: If not for the Unified Experience, why else would anyone use Google+ instead of any other social network?
(Disclaimer: I haven't tried this with the new Contacts).
Check the box on the left for two contacts, and then in the upper right you can click the merge icon, two arrows coming together.
FFS, I have 2.5k pixels of horizontal space, and they're saving up space this way? This isn't even a good idea on mobile where there is no such concept as hover.
The UX designer in me is enraged right now.
If we're trying to one-up Google at design, here's my probably-lame attempt, using the bevel to have the cake and eat it too, hopefully. http://i.imgur.com/X4LQD03.png (I changed the names)
I guess it's still less pretty, I don't know.
Edit: And remember, something doesn't necessarily have to be a checkbox for you to select it, it can just be a bevel of some kind. You don't even have to require clicking as an action: You can square-select items (like you would in a file manager), you can long-press (like you would on mobile) etc.
I totally agree, this maybe wasn't the best choice, OTOH the reason such things happens is because of - drumroll please - designers.
One mans state of the art in UI is sometimes another mans usability problem.
(That said I really appreciate the good work UX designers do : )
Here's a more detailed rationale as to why:
1. The Checkbox-Avatar (checkvatar!) form creates two completely different functions ("identify" and "select") and puts them on the same button, in the exact same space. This sort of decision needs to be strongly justified when it happens; for example, when you have limited space on a device and can't have more than 3 buttons but require more functionality than that.
In this case, I have a very high amount of space on my screen; the designer knows that because he's giving me the non-mobile UI.
2. The checkbox itself doesn't graphically afford being checked. It's a simple flat, black square that replaces a more complex image. When I first saw it, I thought it was a glitch. Clicking close or next to it doesn't check the box but instead opens the contact details. Bad feedback to the user.
3. Elaborating on 2.: The avatar is critical to identifying a contact. When you hover the contact and the avatar goes away, part of that identity has been lost. It's confusing and can cause the user to have to double check they are even hovering/selecting the correct contact in the first place. To put it in simpler terms: Go in your contact list, look for someone using their avatars (without looking at their name) and attempt to select that person. Your hand/eye coordination is thrown off-balance.
4. Hovering is not possible on all devices. Even if I'm not on mobile, this doesn't work on touch screens. This is design 101.
And all that aside I also see that shift-clicking to select multiple contacts doesn't work. Recreating functionality they/we got right a long time ago is hard...
This is usually solved by adding a phonetic field to the names field, and while I can do it on my iPhone, I haven't figured out hot to do it on Google contacts, which I sync with.
My problem is that I added phonetic names on my Mac and synced to Google, but the fields are missing on the web. Nor could be synced to my iPhone. Wired thing is that my old phonetic data is synced. I suppose that they have some compatibility bug.
When you expand the groups or circles on the left, if there are too many to fit on your screen, you're out of luck--no scrollbar appears.
All the same, if I no longer have to worry about Google Voice contacts being somehow distinct from Google Contacts, it's an improvement.
(I don't know if it's new or specific to Contacts though.)
In short it looks very much following material design and the style of inbox now.
edit: only personal not apps account have this preview.
Because Google hates us :(