How Hard Can It Be?

Y'know, I'm a Level 6 Google Guide... according to an email they sent me last year, I've had over a million people read my reviews, and 750,000+ views of photos that I've added to maps. I even make a point of answering questions about places I go frequently and writing detailed reviews (good or bad) when I have an experience worth mentioning. You'd think that somewhere in there, I'd have learned how to add an entry directly from Maps or Google search results to my contact list - surely I haven't been doing it manually all this time without noticing, right? And yet today, I discovered that I don't know as much as I think I should... either that, or the functionality used to be so intuitive that I didn't even notice it and has now become difficult at best, even for someone as experienced as me.

Turns out that it's not particularly difficult, it's just a little obtuse. If you've looked up the businesss on the Google website, you should see the business information panel on the right, which contains the name, address, phone number, pictures, ratings, etc. You'd think you could add it to your contacts from there somehow, but if so I was unable to find the right button. What I did find, after scrolling past the Q&A section but before the ratings and reviews, was a small section with a button to "Send To Phone". That seemed one step closer to having them in my address book, so I clicked that; within seconds, my phone beeped for and incoming noification, and clicking on that took me to the busines in Google Maps. Once I was there, I clicked on the top of the business panel (just below the map) and swiped up, so the business covered the whole screen. Once there, I found the "three-dots" menu in the upper right corner, which contained exactly what I needed: Add To Contacts. Of course I had to type in the name, but that's okay... I rarely want the name in my address book to be exactly the same as it's rendered on the web. Once I had the name the way I wanted it, I clicked "Create Contact"... and nothing happened.

Well, seemingly nothing happened... when I hit the back arrow, instead of taking me back to the Google Results it displayed a contact screen, with the name displayed and three options: Add Home Address, Add Work Address and Add Other Address. As one might expect, Add Home or Add Work will add the address to your contact as either the Home Address or Work Address; Add Other will allow you to pick a custom address type. Once you pick one of those, you'll be returned to the business's page in Maps, but with a new addition... a section right at the top labeled From your Google contacts. Visible only to you. Below that will be the contact name you entered, along with the type of address you chose. Clicking the three-button menu next to it will give you the option to See Contact (as well as hiding or removing it)... if you do that, you'll notice quickly that while the address was added, the phone number is nowhere to be found. Alas... I guess that's what you get for creating a contact with Maps. Fortunately, it's not hard to add the phone number. If you can see the phone number, just ignore this next part, but if you can't (which seems to be many cases): Just above your contact (and below the business name) in Maps is a tab bar of menu items, and scrolling all the way over to the right-most item will allow you to click the About tab. This will most certainly show the phone number (assuming the business has allowed Google to display it); from here, you can either long-click the number to add it to your clipboard or short-click the number to bring it up (but not dial it) in your phone application. If you have done the latter, you'll see that familiar three-dot menu in the top right corner again, and just to the left of it a search icon and a plus sign. Click the plus sign and select Update existing contact from the menu displayed at the bottom. From there, just start typing the name you used when you added it to your contacts and select it once you see it; the number will be automatically added, although you may want to change the type (which seems to default to home). On the other hand, if you chose to copy the number to your clipboard, scroll the tab-bar menu back to the far left and click Overview so you can see your Contacts entry again. Click the three-dot menu next to your contact to See Contact, then click the pencil icon at the bottom of the screen to Edit. Now you can simply long-click the empty phone number field, hit Paste when the menu displays, and pick the type of phone number (usually Work, under the circumstances). If you want to be super-organized like me, you might also select any Groups to which you'd like to add the number and maybe even look up the website URL if you're feeling ambitious... or not. Either way, when you're done hit Save, and now you have this business in your Contacts to make life easier next time you need them.

Honestly, I love Google to pieces, and I use as much of their functionality as I can, because it's ubiquitous, it's cheap and it's usually very well integrated together. This particular task seems like a major fail on their part... it should be so much easier. I'm searching with Google, using Chrome, looking at Google Maps and adding to Google contacts... and yet it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to do this and a great deal longer to write about it. For my next task tonight, I'm going to hunt down Google's suggestion box and drop them a link to this blog entry... although honestly, insofar as it's not clear and easy to perform this task could well be a conscious decision on their part. They have to be constantly looking over their shoulder, wondering just how closely they can integrate their products before MapQuest sues them for using their Android OS as a competitive advantage over other maps providers, or a bunch of iPhone users open a class-action lawsuit alleging lost wages for the extra five minutes it takes them to add an entry to their Contact List. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but I thought the lawsuit that forced them to resdesign large chunks of their operating system because it relied on the installation of Internet Explorer was just a Sour Grapes motion by the plaintiffs and a bad precedent set by the court. If you don't like IE (which I don't), then don't use it... but if a company already has XML-parsing code written into one of their products, it seems insane to me that they should be required to rewrite it. But hey, I'm neither a lawyer nor a judge... I'm just a software developer that believes in clean, well-designed and (perhaps most importantly) reusable code. As a developer, I don't want to have to write the same code twice or even cut-and-paste a chunk (thereby doubling any maintenance impact).

Anyway, if you can't afford to spend five minutes of your time adding a contact, you probably shouldn't have bought an iPhone anyway. I just want to know why a company that clearly knows how to integrate their products as well as Google does has such a clunky mechanism for adding a business from Google Maps to Google Contacts. Maybe it's just a pet peeve... or maybe I simply failed to find the easy way to do it. Please feel free to call me out if I typed this all up for nothing, but only if you have an easier way of accomplishing the task.