If you are like me your list of contacts has universal functionality. The primary purpose is for email and phone calls, but you also have things like mailing holiday cards and birthday invites. In all your contact list has names, addresses, phone numbers, social network information, instant message information, birthday, anniversary, and many other useful details. It is no wonder Chris and I have had a debate over the last 5 years around the best way to deal with having multiple contacts that all share a single phone number, like husband and wife or parent and child. Before I explain our theories let me outline a potential issue this can cause.
Multiple Contacts with a Single Number
Imagine for a moment you have a contact Chris Ashley and Emily Ashley, husband and wife, in your contact list. They share the same home number but have different mobile and work numbers, so far nothing out of the ordinary. If you put the home phone number on both contacts in your phone when a call comes in from the home number on most phones it will always show up as Emily Ashley. I say most phone as we have tested this on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile and all except blackberry defaulted to Emily vs. Chris.
There are several schools of thoughts how to handle multiple contacts that have 1 or more numbers in common.
Option 1: Phone Number goes on 1 contact
Place the number in common with the person you have the strongest relationship with. In the example above Chris and I have been friends for 32 years and 90+% of the time I am calling to talk to him. The upside is inbound calls will always read as Chris Ashley. The downside is if you call Emily on her mobile and she does not answer to call he at home you have to search for Chris to dial the home number. With voice dialing this may not be a huge concern to most.
Option 2: Create a single contact
Another option is to create one contact say Chris & Emily Ashley and put in the numbers for who you talk to most. This works great when you rarely call the second person or the second person has no unique numbers like mobile or work. The downside here is obvious you do not have a contact for the person you rarely talk to. Keep in mind with this option you are losing phone numbers and a variety of other contact option like IM.
Option 3: One Contact Per Person
In this option each person has their own contact with both unique number(s) (work and mobile) and shared number(s) (home and work). This does create the problem we highlighted above where the phone does not know which of the two contacts is calling from the shared number. This option does allow for a contact picture for each contact if you care about this type of thing. Additionally, this option allow you to look up the person you want to contact then deal with alternate contact methods without switching contacts.
So What is the Best Solution
I don’t believe any option is the best choice rather a hybrid of the options above. After 5+ years of debating this topic maybe the current model for contacts could be updated to add some hierarchy to reduce redundant information.I figured we should ask the readers how in the heck do you manage your contacts and this problem?