Contact Linking in Sphere
Paving the future of the Sphere app
How do you balance potential user needs with simplicity?
Sphere is a new product that helps real estate agents manage and reach out to their sphere of influence to gain more business. Most real estate agents use a combination of CRMs, reminder apps, and automated campaign software to achieve this. As we set out to create a simple and effective product to answer this need, we learned that most users would want to import contacts from multiple sources - their CRM, phone, Google account, etc. This then presented the problem that users may have many duplicate contacts and would lead to clutter and confusion when using Sphere.
Getting to the core issue
There’s a pretty high chance that users will have the same contact in multiple import sources. So, in order to maintain Sphere’s efficiency, users need an easy way to identify and link duplicate contacts.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of potential complexity to this problem. We need a clear way of encouraging users to link duplicates without removing their agency. Users may want the ability to unlink contacts at some point. How does linking contacts impact any syncing Sphere does back to the original source? All of these questions and concerns made the designs for the user flow really hairy really fast.
Focus on the basics
I went through multiple iterations of user flows and wireframes, each more complicated than the last. I sat down with my PM and shared my frustrations with him, and we decided to revisit our competitive research together. We found that all of the other platforms simply offered fewer options to the user. They weren’t trying to answer every potential need of every single user, but they were offering the necessary functionality that would be enough for the vast majority.
I was then able to return to the root of our problem and craft a clean and simple experience. Users are able to easily navigate to this page where they can review the contact information for the potential duplicates and choose to link them or keep them separate.
Success across multiple platforms
Contact linking now works exactly the way it should. It’s unobtrusive and intuitive, and we were able to launch Sphere because this was figured out. Since then we’ve been working on making a mobile app equivalent and looking to the future - when we’ll start connecting to social media accounts and import those contacts. The simplicity of this design has made the initial work on these future projects much easier.
This experience helped me remember to always reference the research we’ve done. While it’s sometimes helpful to brainstorm theoretical issues users may encounter, that exercise shouldn’t dictate the whole direction a feature or product moves in.
