Change default fields in Mac Contacts Address Book?

While there’s nothing as constant as change in the computer world — particularly with user interfaces — it’s surprising how sometimes corners of a user experience can be stuck in the past without anyone updating them or improving things for users. The default fields in the Contacts (formerly known as “Address Book”) program on the Mac is a prime example of that, and it’s downright weird that “AIM” is one of the default fields. I don’t know how representative I am, but out of my 900+ contacts I have exactly ZERO AIM handles.
What’s AIM? It’s America Online’s Instant Messenger service and it’s tied into iMessage and Facetime, which is why Apple keeps it around. But really, while there are a ton of people on Facebook and Twitter, I don’t know of anyone who is still even remotely associated with AOL, whether it’s their messenger service or anything else.
Now we can complain or we can fix it. Let’s do the latter.
To change the default fields on your Contacts template, start by opening up the program and going to Preferences. But let’s have a look first at the default fields before the change:

Useless fields, and a useful field like Facebook profile name or Twitter handle? Missing in action.
To fix that, go to Preferences, as I said earlier. Easiest is to press Cmd-, a pretty universal shortcut for that task on Mac systems:

Click on “Template” and you’ll see the defaults:

To remove a field, click on the tiny red “-” button. I’ll get rid of that goofy “Home: User Name AIM” field. The result is already a bit more streamlined:

Notice I’ve also changed the default email address label from “Home” to “Work”.
To add a new field, click on “Add Field”. A bunch of options appear:

Note that the confusingly labeled “Profile” is actually “Facebook Profile”, and that any option that’s greyed out is because it’s already on the card template.
I’m going to remove URL and replace it with “Twitter”:

Very nice and a good match for what I like to record in people’s Contact information. But if you click on the tiny up/down arrows adjacent to “Twitter”, you’ll find you can specify one of a large number of different social media sites:

Turns out the same holds true for just about every field label. Click on “Home” next to address and you can pick a different default label:

Notice here you can also change the default address format too, if you’re not USA-based and find that the address fields don’t work with your local address standard. No sweat, it’s a huge list of choices from which you can choose.
Finally, here’s my new improve template at work:

A much better match for the information I track from friends and colleagues.