Dear Mr. Jobs, I have some ideas about how to improve your phone (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.