Single-Step Dialing on the iPhone OS

On the iPhone OS, contacts grouped into the "Favorites" section of the phone application can be dialed with a single touch to the listed name, but for all other contacts in the "All Contacts" section, this is a two-step process.  The first tap on the name instead opens the details page for that contact, and the desired phone number in that contact's details page must then be selected by a second tap.

Out of habit, I find that I sometimes tap a name in the two-step "All Contacts" section, and hold it to my ear immediately, only to discover that the phone isn't dialing.  (I then have to lower the phone to glance at the screen, select the phone number, and raise the phone back to my ear.)

What should happen is that if this contact has only one associated phone number, the iPhone should automatically dial that number once the phone is held to your ear, using its accelerometer and ambient sensors. That way, selecting a name and bringing the phone to your ear results in the same device reaction regardless of from which of these two sections the dial originated (again, for single-number contacts only).

Redownloading Paid Apps

In the iTunes Store, you have the ability to redownload an app you already purchased, which is useful if you've lost the backup copies on all your devices. But it's not immediately obvious to everyone, including yours truly, and people have to discover this by trial and error or by online resources.

Apple's official docs on this issue are also ambiguous though, as a user trying to download an owned app will encounter the message, "Are you sure you want to buy and download [app name]? Your account will be debited for this purchase and your application will begin to download immediately."

Only after the user clicks "Buy" does a reassuring second message appear acknowledging a prior purchase - "You have already purchased this item. To download it again for free, select OK".

This second message should have been the first and only message upon attempting the redownload. After all, the user is logged in with that account if this stage of the process is reached, so this can easily be determined.

A clearer approach would be to remove the price from the text copy of the button ($0.99 BUY) since the user will not be charged that price when clicking that button, as well as to remove the "buy" text because most people will interpret that word to mean an exchange of money unless $0.00 is explicitly written alongside it.

But writing ($0.00 BUY) is also misleading because the retail price of that item is not free.  So an improvement would be something like my proposal in figure 2 (second image above), with the text (REDOWNLOAD).  It could even be ($0.00 REDOWNLOAD) or (FREE REDOWNLOAD) to make it absolutely clear.

Tapping the buy button again in Mobile iTunes on iOS devices, on the other hand, is much clearer, as it first prompts the second of the two earlier messages.  It still suffers the issue of saying "buy" though.
The best implemented example is the "Update" button for a previously purchased app. Updates are free for owned apps, so it gets to avoid the buying concept altogether and throws the message, "This update is free because you own a previous version of this item. To get this update now, select OK".

These issues need to be fixed, and probably exist as a relic of the pre-app days of the iTunes Store, when users were not allowed to redownload music or other media.  It's your move, iTunes team.

Scoreboard Confusion

When I first saw the picks and results board for Yahoo! Sports Fantasy World Cup 2010, it took me a second to distinguish between an incorrect pick and the actual outcome between any given two countries.  There was something counterintuitive about their choice of icons and color coding for each row's status - it was using green checkmarks for wins, but gray checkmarks for selections, including incorrect ones.  And it was using red X's to mark the winner of the actual game outcome.

This meant that if you picked Italy to win against Slovakia (where Slovakia won), it would show you a gray checkmark on Italy to indicate that you picked it, which you might mistake as a winning result based on the similar green checkmark and background for actual winners.  In this case, the actual winner is marked by a red X and background, which you might mistake as an incorrect pick, rather than a correct result.  Seeing that the red X and background of the score prediction in the right columns actually do indicate an incorrect pick rather than result, this inconsistency only adds to the confusion.  (See the first screenshot.)

What I'd propose (in the second screenshot) is a modification that clearly distinguishes all actual outcomes the same way, say, with a bounding border with a soccer ball (not a trophy, as only one ultimate team gets a trophy).  The green checks and red X's would then be reserved for what people associate with them - correct or incorrect - in this case, the correctness of your pick.  After all, it doesn't make sense to call a country's actual win "incorrect", so it's best that the green/red system doesn't correspond with actual results at all.

Highly visible

This has been bugging me ever since Google rolled out its outset text input fields site-wide - the vertical alignment issue.

Someone's container and input heights aren't playing nice.