Back to projects

ContactHi

A React Native prototype for a next-generation contacts app that organizes people by importance and proximity, rather than alphabetically, enabling contextual, relationship-driven contact retrieval.
  • Productivity
  • Messaging
  • Prototyping
  • Mobile Development
  • UX Design
  • Systems Design
  • React Native
  • Firebase
  • Local Storage
  • QR Codes
  • Bluetooth
  • iOS
See Repository

Project Overview

Default contacts apps feel like junk drawers for people’s information. They offer little more than an alphabetical list and basic search, which is cumbersome for real-world needs. We set out to design a smarter contacts app that understands how people actually want to retrieve and act on their contacts.

Instead of surfacing names in alphabetical order, ContactHi organizes contacts by:

  1. Importance (how much you care about the relationship)
  2. Proximity (who is physically closest to you right now or in a given city)

The result is a more contextually aware contacts app that helps users answer questions like:

  • Who were the last five people I met?
  • Which friends in San Francisco should I invite to a party?
  • Who did I just meet at this conference?
  • Which professional contacts do I have in this city?
  • Who are my top romantic interests nearby?
  • Who are my favorite people I want to message this holiday season?
Screenshot

Core Features

  • Categorized Relationships

    • Three key relationship types: friendly, professional, and romantic.
    • Each relationship type has four levels of intent: no interest, low, medium, high.
    • Icons (1–3) visualize the importance of each relationship type.

  • Contextual Filtering

    • Filter by location to see contacts nearby or in a specific city.
    • Filter by relationship type and importance level.
    • Recently added and “last met” lists for better recall.

  • Proximity Sorting
    The app surfaces people closest to your current or chosen location, ensuring that travel, meetups, and events feel more natural to coordinate.

  • Quick Contact Sharing
    Borrowing from the old “Bump” concept, we enabled programmatic sharing through QR codes and Bluetooth.

  • Pressing Use Cases

    • Follow-ups: After networking or conferences.
    • Events: Invite close friends or professional contacts in a city.
    • Personal: Surface only top relationships for holidays, gratitude lists, or travel.

Technical Insights

  • React Native was chosen for cross-platform development across iOS and Android.
  • Firebase handled sync and lightweight backend storage.
  • Contacts were stored in a hybrid system: local storage for fast retrieval and cloud sync for continuity.
  • Leveraged the universal .vcf / .vcard contact protocols used by Android and iOS to ensure compatibility with existing contacts databases.

UX Considerations

  • Users could set intent levels when adding a contact, or later through a daily inbox flow to avoid awkward social situations.
  • Contacts were not confined to one relationship type — a person could be both a close friend and a professional contact.
  • The app reframed contacts as intent-based relationships rather than static records, encouraging more meaningful interactions.

Outcomes

  • Created a working prototype of a contacts app that better reflects real human relationship management.
  • Validated that importance and proximity are far more useful dimensions than alphabetical order.
  • Established a model for how a next-generation contacts app could grow without competing with existing social networks.

Lessons Learned

  • Alphabetical order is almost never the best retrieval system for human contacts.
  • Users naturally desire contextual surfacing of contacts based on intent, geography, and situation.
  • Building on top of existing .vcf / .vcard protocols allows innovation without requiring new network effects.

Demo & Source

GitHub Repository: ContactHi

Prev
Daplie
Next
PatientPowered