Matchstick Message #5: We're not supposed to remember hundreds of email addresses

from Tara Raffi to Student Information Requests date Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 8:38 PM subject Matchstick Message #5: We're not supposed to remember hundreds of email addresses

Dear RIM,

There is a point in time when a certain feature ceases to be an innovation, and just becomes common sense. An excellent example of this can be found in BlackBerry's email application.

This is how I think about it. The list of recent calls that one has made, commonly known as a "call log", is an ancient feature of cell phones. Also, one major reason the BlackBerry appeals to consumers is for its email capabilities, particularly because it has a fixed keyboard. Therefore, it seems logical to apply the capabilities of this phone call log to the email application.

The call log is a good place to go for recently or commonly called contacts, and also to find numbers that are not in ones address book. When writing an email, however, you must either manually input an address or enter a contact that has an email listed for it. But there is no memory for recently used addresses. Why is this a huge problem? Many reasons:

1. Email addresses are not commonly kept in address books, and thus, for BlackBerry's non-enterprise users, are not readily accessible when writing an email. Perhaps for people with exceptionally extensive (or narrowly focused) memories, or the main character in Momento, this is not a problem. But for the rest of us, we (first) get it wrong a few times, (then) send annoying texts to our friends asking them to remind us if it was mayganadhar@berkeley or mdhar@berkeley, or (finally) just download the Gmail application and juggle information between the two programs. This is clearly ridiculous.

2. Users are not motivated to enter email addresses in contact books, and probably will never be. This is because, unlike phone numbers, email addresses usually are pretty good at informing us about the identity of the contact--so we don't need to. Also, when using Gmail on our computers, addresses are automatically indexed by the user's name and come up automatically in the To: field. (If you don't use Gmail, you have much larger user design problems to sort out.)

So basically, the To: fields in the BlackBerry email application should not be linked only to the address book, but also to a list of recent email addresses. As technology becomes an inseparable part of our lives, software developers need to be aware that the way we use and access information should be continually rethought to mirror the way consumers experience the product.

Sincerely,

Tara Raffi

List Enthusiast

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