Palm: Treo Contacts with shared information
True to the detail-oriented nature of this site, I’m going to start with an interface challenge to an interface-expert company, Palm. Renowned for their ‘two taps to anywhere’ goals, the Palm OS team has been for years focusing on ease-of-use and succeeding extremely well. However, there is one item that could be easily fixed that has been overlooked: Contacts who share information.
We all have some – the perfect example is couples where you know both people in the relationship. They generally share the same address and the same home phone number, but their cell phones are different and their email address too. Maybe it’s your aunt and uncle and you have records for each of their kids so you don’t forget their birthdays or emails… or it could also be people who work at the same company with the same address.
So what happens when they move?
You have to chase down every record that has the old information, and change them independently. Or, you have to have only one record that has all of the people listed and notate their differences by hand. Not good.
The solution? Well, I think I gave it away in the title. Allow records to share information. Change it once and it ripples through the links.