Having belatedly upgraded to Mac OS X Lion, I’ve recently been encountering some of the newer features and tweaks. One of the more unwelcome has come in the form of the new UI for Address Book.

The “window” for Address Book is now a 3-page “book”, one page for the list of contact groups, one page for the list of contacts, and one page for contact detail. It even has page-flip animation. I’m sure that someone worked very hard to implement this. It looks cute. It’s also a bad way in which to interact with my address book data.

The fact that the UI looks like a book is bad for three reasons: It is inconsistent with the UI of other OS X applications, the analogy to a paper address book is tenuous at best, and it’s a choice to sacrifice function for the sake of some cutesy form.

The difference in look-and-feel from other OS X applications is immediately striking. The choice of a book as a form factor forces many idiosyncrasies. The title bar of the window is gone, though buttons for closing, minimizing, and maximizing the window remain, conspicuously embedded in the upper left corner of a page. The window is moved by hold-clicking on any “blank” area of a page, making accidental window moves an annoyance while shuffling information around within the application. The left and right borders are each 20 pixels wide. (That’s five times the width of the default Windows 7 border thickness.) All this screams one big question: WHY A BOOK!?

People do not use computerized address books in the same way that they used to use paper address books. Paper address books sucked. You had to flip through chaotic blocks of crossed-out and duplicate entries to find hastily handwritten information that could barely be deciphered. You ran out of space for some letters and started placing S entries under Z, just because that page was empty and you didn’t want to buy a bigger book for the week of work it would require to transfer everything. They were a mess.

Old paper address books didn’t have a separate page for a list of contacts by name. Nor did they have a page for a list of contact groups. I would remember that. Also, many contacts were generally bunched together on a single page, in order to minimize the size of the book. None of this one-contact-per-page business, to say nothing of having a single page for all contacts that you can see only one at a time. The analogy is fundamentally broken.

Yes, I get that “Address Book” has the word “Book” baked in. That doesn’t mean I think about it like an actual book. Moreover, I don’t even want to think about it like a book. I hated “book” address books. Thanks for the reminder.

Worse, though, are the restrictions that such a form places on my views of the data. In one view, for example, I can see a list of contacts on the left and the detail of a single contact on the right. I cannot also simultaneously see the list of contact groups, because the UI designers decided to impose the physical-book restriction of being able to see only two pages at a time. Additionally, the list of contacts must necessarily be as wide as the contact detail, again due to a physical-book restriction of same-sized pages. If I resize to have narrow pages, the contact detail gets scrunched and clipped. If I resize to have wide pages, the left-justified list of contacts gets distanced from the contact detail, making it more difficult to navigate.

The Address Book UI is simply awful. Cute, but awful. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Now might be a good time to give Bento a try.