Better Organizing Your Contacts: An Empirical Study of an Intelligent Social Contact Management System

Human memory is generally poor and often fails in unpredictable ways, sometimes with dire consequences. On social occasions, it usually causes embarrassing situations (e.g., forgetting the name of a friend). Moreover, as the number of contacts increases, people feel difficult to maintain their social contacts with merely memory. Aiming at helping people better manage their social contacts, a powerful social contact management tool named SCM is introduced. It supports the auto-collection of rich contact data and a simple but efficient contact retrieval interface. First, an online survey is carried out with a series of questions about contact management. Based on the survey results, the SCM system is developed. Furthermore, to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of SCM, a user study of contact management is performed which proved SCM is very helpful for contact re-finding. On the other hand, several particular phenomena about social contact management and recall are discovered. The human contact-memorizing pattern is also concluded based on the result of this user study.