

Dear Mr. Jobs, I have some ideas about how to improve your phone - FictiveCameron
http://www.cooper.com/journal/2009/07/dear_mr_jobs.html

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brk
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
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.

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pxlpshr
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
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
So, in other words, just like Android?

~~~
netsp
I think you're right.

I have neither myself. I use an old phone with a black and white screen that
has a contact book and makes calls so I am blissfully not opinionated.

I like that there are different platforms taking different approaches. If
Apple wants to approve apps and 'manage' the market, centrally plan away. If
Google wants to direct an open system, go ahead. The approaches can compete,
that way whatever works lasts and we might have several open or several closed
platforms. If they both make it, it probably means they serve different
markets. Also good.

At the end of the day, both are far from a monopoly that can dictate anything.
Consumers are opting for the Apple system.

I guess eventually most phones will be 'smart' and as long as Apple don't make
most of them, I'm not worried.

~~~
dejb
> as long as Apple don't make most of them, I'm not worried.

Exactly.

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FictiveCameron
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.

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teej
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
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
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.

~~~
mikeryan
You seem to be picking nits. The _only_ time its telling you of an absence of
a voicemail is when it's a 1.

~~~
jlees
Not always. I have a weird bug with my iPhone where I'll receive voicemails,
but the phone itself doesn't ring - others have reported this too (whether
it's an O2 UK problem or what, I don't know).

Thus it's actually _really_ useful for me to know if I have a missed call or a
voicemail that never rang through. It also confuses the hell out of a system
that'd try to guess which missed call the voicemail belongs to...

~~~
mikeryan
Its definitely not a UK problem - happens here in SF w/ AT&T usually in my
house when I can't get a signal ;-)

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jimm
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
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.)

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amcclosky
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
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.

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pistoriusp
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.

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seasoup
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.

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makecheck
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.

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grinich
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.

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ashot
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.

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

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

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

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AGorilla
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
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
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.

~~~
mikeryan
"chances are good" is a slippery slope.

~~~
dkasper
You could make this work if you took into account the time the call and voice
mail were received. You could even treat them as a "conversation" kind of how
gmail does.

~~~
roc
The thing that strikes me as odd, is that Apple _doesn't_ do this. This
problem and work-around were obvious to me the first time I got a voicemail.
And Apple doesn't often make thoughtless mistakes like that.

It makes me wonder if AT&Ts voice mail system just isn't giving them enough
information to match the records reliably.

(E.g. If the voice mail record doesn't distinguish between the origination
number and the callback number, trying to match messages to missed calls would
be inconsistent.)

It wouldn't have to be much; just enough margin for error to make the system a
little unreliable. Because I can definitely see Apple opting for 'weird, but
consistent' over 'inconsistent', even if it is only _rarely_ inconsistent.

