Dear Mr. Jobs, I have some ideas about how to improve your phone

Dear Mr. Jobs, I have some ideas about how to improve your phone(cooper.com)

87 points by FictiveCameron 16 years ago | 38 comments

brk 16 years ago |

This was a really well written and thought-out piece.

I've had many of the same frustrations with my iPhone, the only reason that it's not more annoying is because I don't use my iPhone much as a phone.

The multi-account email switching also seems to be much more hassle than it really should need to be.

I'd also to be able to see some sort of missed calls/voicemails/emails status on the main screen, even before unlocking the phone. It seems trivial, but having to slide/unlock the phone just to get some basic status info gets tiresome after a while.

johns 16 years ago | |

What's really strange to me is that 3rd party notifications get more prominence on the locked screen than the 1st party apps like email. My emails are much more important than a sports score or IM but the 3rd party stuff has access to the screen and email doesn't publish status there.

pxlpshr 16 years ago |

Dear Mr. Jobs, please fix the AppStore approval process before you do anything else.

I can live with the extra dot for missed calls, I actually like being reminded to call them back after listening to a voice mail.

dejb 16 years ago | |

How about removing the app store approval process altogether? And what about allowing programatically customisable homepages/widgets? Then users could have it work the way they wanted instead of begging apple to change things.

nuclear_eclipse 16 years ago | | |

So, in other words, just like Android?

FictiveCameron 16 years ago |

While this isn't a major pain point for me, I think it's a great mini UX case study by one of the folks at Cooper Design. Definitely spot on about the redundancy of checking the voicemail and then click on recent calls just to get rid of the dot.

teej 16 years ago |

With this redesign, I gain the convenience of not having to clear the red dot. To me, that seems like a trivial pain point.

With this redesign, I -lose- information and functionality on voicemails. My home screen no longer indicates if I have unread voicemails, only missed calls. I can't separately manage my call history (which I never clear) and my voicemail inbox (which I always clear). I don't know with one glance how many missed calls vs voicemails I have.

That seems like a LOT of functionality loss for VERY LITTLE pain relieved.

callahad 16 years ago | |

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't two missed calls without voicemail display identically as a single missed call with voicemail? I don't think you have that information in the first place.

Once you get into the app, of course, things are conflated, but if anything, you're gaining information on the home screen: You can be sure that the number on the icon is the actual number of missed calls.

teej 16 years ago | | |

True, you are gaining the information of the -exact- number of missed calls you have. The information isn't important on the main screen though. The current design tells me about the -absence- of a voicemail, when it has a red (1) on it. That is what I'm losing in this design.

jimm 16 years ago |

The "red text" suggestion won't work for some color-blind people. There's got to be some non-color visual representation of the state.

jacobolus 16 years ago | |

Even monochromats can differentiate red from black, because the black is substantially darker. (Which isn't necessarily to say that adding other cues isn't also a good idea.)

mikeryan 16 years ago | |

True but its consistent with the current UX which indicates missed calls in red (if you're looking at All recent calls)

amcclosky 16 years ago |

I think the design of the apple UI in this case is more a product of the way missed calls and voice mails actually work.

I can't think of a reliable way to associate voice mails with the appropriate missed calls since multiple calls from the same number could and probably often do come in before the voice mail is even registered as existing by the phone.

potatolicious 16 years ago | |

Many frontends simply emulate the behavior of the backend. This is unacceptable if it interferes with user experience - and really is just lazy design. You want a comprehensive user experience, not a thin wrapper around the command line.

pistoriusp 16 years ago |

I'll concede his point, but... not everyone has visual voicemail. Like me, simply because I can't get it on my network in South Africa. So I never see little red dots over the voicemail tab.

Clicking on voicemail simply makes a phone call to my voicemail box.

seasoup 16 years ago |

Great ideas here. Switching email accounts has got to be my biggest time sink on the iPhone. I have one account for work and one for personal and it is a pain having to go to one to read the new message and then switch to another to read those messages.

Another alternative would be to introduce a new view, which contained unread messages on all accounts, sort of like the Apple Mail interface on the mac which lets me choose between mailboxes or an aggregated view but instead of showing all mails it only shows ones that were unread upon opening the view.

makecheck 16 years ago |

Those changes would be welcome, and aren't unique to the iPhone.

Apple could improve notification on the Mac side, too. Notifications aren't supposed to mean "drop everything and look at me", they're supposed to be easy to ignore for awhile. But the red numbers, and especially the bouncing icons, are extremely distracting. I am too often forced to do a "shut up, already!" click on the Dock (with accompanying unintended app switch) to quiet a bouncing app before getting back to my work.

grinich 16 years ago |

I also wonder why voice messages aren't put in the "Messages" app. Seems like a more natural place to put them. When you launch the Phone, you want to make a call, not read messages. It's just a relic of the dial-to-get-voicemail era, probably cemented in place by AT&T contracts.

ashot 16 years ago |

close, but no cigar.

It should be a unified, filterable timeline of calls, voicemails, and txts (look ma, a newsfeed!)

I communicate with people (often the same people) through multiple mediums throughout the day. The most important information to me is what occured in the last 10 minutes, hour, day. why should I have to manually switch between types?

Open up one screen, flip through unread messages, voicemails, and calls.

derefr 16 years ago |

On a very tangential note, that Outbound Greeting category shouldn't be in the redesigned menu; it should be in the Preferences app.

Oompa 16 years ago |

However true this is, I think there are bigger issues at hand, like how horrible AT&T has been recently.

johns 16 years ago | |

This has been thoroughly discussed in other threads. No need to bring it into this one.

AGorilla 16 years ago |

Mixing the voicemails in with the entire call history is a terrible idea for a few reasons: 1. If you've made/received enough phone calls to fill the page before checking your voicemails, you have to scroll or filter to find the new voicemail. 2. If you're trying to find an old voicemail, you have to filter or MEGA scroll to find it. 3. Voicemail is virtually hidden from new users. I can imagine many people tapping the icon with the little red 1 and then not having any idea what to do.

Counting voicemails and missed calls separately is a little annoying, but this is definitely not the way to solve the problem. If this were ever implemented I would throw my phone in the garbage.

mikeryan 16 years ago | |

I kind of agree but to the article's credit it does filter for voicemail.

To me it seems one option would be to remove the recent dot after viewing a voicemail.

That being said I think these two systems are independent of each other, ie there's nothing to link the voicemail to a recent call (seems the recent call is a "client" side action as opposed to the voicemail which is "server" side action). Without some sort of call id they can't really link the two to remove the dot on the recents when cleared from voicemail.

Actually the more I think about it the more I believe this is likely the case, I don't think recent calls are linked to voicemail. Anyone know?

tdavis 16 years ago | | |

That wouldn't matter. After a voicemail is received, compare its attributes to recently missed calls. If there was a missed call from the same number that left the voicemail, chances are good the recent highlight can be removed.

DannoHung 16 years ago | |

Hmm... compromise perhaps: Voicemail page stays the same, loses an indication of new voicemails, Call log keeps indication of new calls and ability to play voicemail associated with a call. No change to coloring of missed calls.

* Point 1 is mitigated because missed calls show up in red. * Point 2 is mitigated because voicemail page remains. * Point 3 is ignored because it's probably not a huge concern.

AGorilla 16 years ago | | |

That would be nice except aren't there ways to leave voicemails directly? In that case you would have a voicemail but no missed call. It's a less-than-important edge case, I admit.

tdavis 16 years ago | |

This was my reaction (though not as strong as throwing away my phone ;)

He could have stopped with the part about "don't use redundant dots" and I would've been all for it. The number is misleading, as is the annoyance of having to remove the indicator from Voicemail and Recent, but I don't think the answer is getting rid of one of them...