Overview of the design
The main part of the address book is the register of persons in the book, sorted by last name. Each person in the address book has a group of attributes. There will be attributes, besides the person’s name, for e-mail address, telephone number among others. The persons in the address book will also have a misc. field where the user can type in whatever he wants about a specific person. The misc. field won't be shown in the register though.
In this register the user has the possibility to change the order in which the attributes will be shown for the persons and also to change the size of the fields in the individual tabs. This is because each user has preferences about what attributes he thinks is the most relevant.
There are tabs for all the letters in the alphabet, which relate to the first letter in the last name attribute. The need for a tab for each letter is because there could be a lot of persons in the address book and aggregating letters would mean to many persons in one tab. The distribution would also be more inconsistent if letters were grouped together. A tab for each letter also means less scrolling and a more natural mapping to where a person are in the address book. Suppose the letters A, B and C were grouped together in one tab and the user wants to see what e-mail address Carl Carson has. This would mean that the user would have to scroll down through the persons with a last name beginning with A or B, which can be a serious amount of persons. When the persons searched for has a last name that begins with C and the user wants to access those persons with a last name beginning with C, he can, with our design, do that without having to scroll past the last names beginning with A or B.
There will be an arrow icon in front of each person that has multiple values for one or a couple of attributes, for example two e-mail addresses or a couple of telephone number. By clicking this arrow all values under the attributes are shown. Among the tabs there will also be a group tab. By clicking this tab the entire user defined groups are shown and by clicking the arrow in front of a group the persons in that group are presented.
In the address book application there will be a dedicated search space with fields for typing in last name, first name and other attributes like e-mail address, telephone number, misc. and so on. The search can be done either in the address book or in the Campus server database. If the user searches the address book and there is no match, the user may want to search the Campus server instead. It can be done by just select "Campus" in the pull down menu. The search results will be presented in the search result field and the attributes that are shown for a person depends on the search. First and last name will always be shown though. If the user does an e-mail address search for example, the e-mail address will be the third attribute shown after first and last name. After a successful search in the Campus server for a specific person that person can be added to the address book by the "Add to address book" button.
The address book interface also includes a contact list field used to contact one or a group of persons. Persons or contact groups are added to the contact list by using the "Add to contact list" button. To contact the selected persons the phone or mail function are used. This contact list approach is useful since otherwise there would be a need to make a contact group for every group of persons that the user would like to contact resulting in a lot of temporary groups.
Most of the functions in the address book appear as buttons in the application. This makes the functions visible to the users and also makes them easier and faster to access. Among the buttons there are functions for handling persons and groups in the address book. There are functions for making a new person or group instance and removing such an instance. Using the "Info" button can modify the information about a person. If the information about a person has been changed in the Campus server database the information can be downloaded to the address book by using the "Update" button. When a function can’t be used the button will be shaded in order to avoid error messages when using a function that has no effect.
At the bottom of the application there will be a status field that gives the user useful information about functions etc. Detailed help about how to manage the address book application will be provided as a choice under the Help menu.
Some of the guidelines we have followed when designing the user interface for the address book have been to make most of the functions visible and to keep down the number of pop up windows. Pop up windows are often annoying because they contain hidden information and they also disables the functionality behind them, i.e. the main interface.
As a consequence of this we put the search result and contact list fields directly in the main window of the interface instead of implementing these functions using pop ups. With this solution the user will have a greater degree of freedom to interact between those fields and the list of persons in the address book. Using this approach also lets the information about search results and contact list remains when opening and closing the application.
Another important issue that we have focused on is the construction of decent error messages. We have worked hard to make the error messages easy to understand and also provide links if the error can be fixed by a specific operation. In order to keep down the number of error messages we make functions that have no effect at the moment shaded. Error messages are one example of good use of pop up windows to get the users attention. This is important in order to give good and clear feedback to the user.
We have also provided feedback about the main functions in the address book application by adding a information field at the bottom of the application.
It has as well been important to make the address book application to have the look and feel of a common paper based ditto.
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