We were incredibly pleased with the feedback on the Messaging app redesign – your feedback there is already being incorporated into updated designs and ideas around the app. Today, we’re here going to discuss a relatively smaller change to the Dialer/Contacts card.
In a change from last week, and to more actively centralize this and future feedback, we’ve spun up a mailing list on Google Groups. The list is invite only for spam protection purposes, but is open for all to request access and join. Please provide the requested response when applying to the group. This group will be used for technical and design discussions surrounding CyanogenMod and should not be used as a forum/user-help/device request area – such posts will be deleted and the user removed without further warning. To join the group, apply here.
We’re looking to introduce a new quick contact card to the CyanogenMod Project. The quick contact card is accessible throughout many apps, including email, dialer, and messaging, by tapping the avatar in the associated list views. For example, tapping the avatar in the recent call list view will bring up the contact card for that contact.
Below is a proposal on which we would like to elaborate on and have a healthy discussion prior to committing to a direction.
The two primary reasons for changing the quick contact card are 1) To construct a quick contact card that is beautiful and functional when images are low resolution, and 2) To allow for more than three operations to be displayed to the user without pressing the overflow menu.
In order to solve the first item, we decided to blur the contacts image behind a smaller avatar portrait. This provides visual interest that will be discovered overtime by our users and works for 100% of the photos associated with a user’s contacts (Some History: Gmail predominantly syncs low resolution images and downgrades images taken on the device when they are synced to the server). This design is biased towards low resolution images, but we felt this was necessary given the constraints imposed by contact services, such as Google, Yahoo, and others.
To solve for the number of permitted operations in the AOSP design, we relocated contact actions below the avatars picture. This allows for 4 actions per contact to be shown to the user at one time. We intentionally located the least used action (block) as the leftmost option to avoid miss taps. Our goal here is to move as much of the actions out of overflow menus as we believe that features are more discoverable when the entry point to the feature is given screen real estate creating a discovery mechanism for the feature. Another advantage of this design is that the actions are closer to the user’s finger versus the AOSP design. Below is an example of the AOSP quick contact screen versus the CyanogenMod design.
We recognize that there will be a lot of concern as we redesign any screen and move things around. Our goal in sharing this today is to solicit feedback from the community as we move things around. Our hope is to do this early and often as we move forward together and shape the device that we all want to use. In no way are our plans set in stone and the team is always making changes to create the best experience possible.
Our plan is to launch this design as part of the nightlies once we refine it based on your feedback. We will continue to refine the design after launch as noted above.
Please feel free to join the above mentioned mailing list to provide your feedback, or leave a comment below.