Although I’m not yet a touch-screen phone user, I already miss the quick way for finding people in my phone book by typing their name using keypad.
I came up with an idea of making people search a bit quicker on touch-screen phones. I wonder if anyone else had or already implemented the same idea…
The idea is basically showing the 2nd letters contained in your contacts’ last names and allowing the user to click them for filtering the phone book entries.
The scenario
You want to call Alex Brown.
You go to your phone book, scroll down to B (or tap B in the alphabet if you use one in your phone book) and see this:
‘[a] [e] [r] [u] [y]‘ represent the 2nd letters of the last names that follow B. They’re clickable. You go ahead and tap [r] .
Now only the last names of your contacts that start with Br are displayed.
In this state [o] and [i] represent the 3rd letters of the contacts’ last names.
If you want to go back and see all the last names starting with B you can do so by pressing [B].
That’s about it. I guess this concept might be useful for those of us who have lots of contacts.
P.S. You can try using this sketchy prototype of this concept on your own. Never mind the visual design and lack of transitional animation, smooth scrolling or whatever — it’s just a quick prototype.
