If you’re a Gmail user, you may have noticed a slight change to the upper left corner of your inbox. The plain text link for “Compose Mail” has been replaced by a nicer looking button and the links for Contacts and Tasks have been moved up.
The area that’s gotten a much bigger face-lift is Contacts. Speculation is that Google is adding features to Contacts in preparation for releasing Google Me, its rumored answer to Facebook. Whatever the reason, the changes are welcome. Contacts was a holdover from Gmail’s early bare-bones interface. Contacts now looks and works more like the rest of Gmail. According to the Official Gmail Blog:
Contacts now works more like the rest of Gmail, so if you know how to use Gmail, now you should automatically feel comfortable in Contacts too. And you’ll see a bunch of the features you’ve requested, including:
- Keyboard shortcuts (go to Contacts and hit “?” for the full list)
- Sort by last name (look under “More actions”)
- Custom labels for phone numbers and other fields
- The ability to undo changes you’ve just made
- Automatic saving
- Structured name fields, so you can adjust titles, suffixes, and other name components
- A bigger, more prominent notes field
Reviews of the changes have been universally good. TechCruch says:
The two main themes of this redesign were simplicity and consistency (with the rest of Gmail), Grol says. From the looks of it, they’ve done a nice job. While it’s still not the prettiest thing in the world, it does look a lot like Gmail now, and the area is much easier to use. I’ve been playing around with it for the past day or so, and I’ve already done more contact organizing in that short time span then I have in the past several years.
Grol says that Contacts was easily the feature that users complained about the most within Gmail. People may have to find something else to complain about now.
The new Contacts are not available yet for Google Apps customers but Google plans to roll out the new version there too, in the near future.
