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.

Headlight Icons on a Car Dashboard

For a company with a reputation for quality and attention to detail, it's surprising to see Honda's oversight of its headlight "on" indicators on the dashboard.  There are three modes for headlights on a Civic - off, daylight lamps on, and headlights on - each with its own distinct icon on the switch, as pictured in the photo.

However, the daylight lamp icon (pair of opposite lights) on the switch is the only one that lights up on the dash in both cases of daylight lamps being on and headlights being on.

The icon for the headlights on the switch has a matching icon on the dash, but that one only lights up when the high beams are on.

So here's the summary, from top to bottom on the switch:

• Off icon on switch: nothing lights on dash (correct).
• Daylight lamps icon on switch: daylight icon lights on dash (correct).
• Headlights on switch: daylight icon lights on dash (incorrect).
• High-beams mode, headlights on switch: daylight and headlight icons light on dash (partially correct).

What should happen is that there should be a dedicated icon for high beams, so that the headlights can reclaim its own icon on the dash.  You could make the counterargument that after the first time, the driver will get used to this behavior, and that it wouldn't be an issue at that point.  But if you can achieve excellency in the design, why not?

Amazon's tiny target areas

Click to confirm shipment. Don't miss!

Single-Line Calculators: Math Through Blinders

Ever since my first time using a TI-82 calculator in middle school, I've despised single-line calculators and the usual limitations that come with them.
The TI-82, TI-83, and many other graphing calculators made by Texas Instruments, Casio, and Hewlett Packard, sported large square screens out of necessity to accommodate the graphing functionality.  As a side benefit, this provided room for arithmetic expressions in a multi-line input.
Multi-line inputs are particularly useful for viewing the history - the last few lines of expressions and values.  With this visual feedback, it was much easier to reference the answer to the last expression, as well as the expressions themselves (seeing the latest assignment of values to variables, reusing parts of the last expression, etc.)  This was much better than a single or dual memory slot under the MEM/recall approach on most typical calculators. And working with single lines (or at most, dual lines on scientific calculators) was like performing computations through blinders.
The graphing calculator was a godsend.

What vexed me was why I could only enjoy this in the tangible world.  Personal computers are even far more powerful computational devices, and yet, bundled calculators on just about every operating system mimicked the feel of the real world (that's fine), but chose the limited calculators as their models (not good).  As a result, they were a pain to use for anything more than a single calculation.
They were workarounds across the years - spreadsheet programs like Excel, full-blown software like MATLAB and Mathematica, online search bar calculators like Google's, offline search bar calculators like Spotlight in Mac OS X - but none of these quite fit the use case.
It had me scrambling for third party calculators, none of which were remotely famous in the mainstream and therefore niches that most people couldn't enjoy.  The Power Calculator from the Windows XP PowerToys was my first good find.  SpeedCrunch was the my first find for other platforms, if you don't count the partially usable paper tape feature for history on Calculator.app in Mac OS X.
But the first one that truly comes close something light and powerful like the TI-8x series was Soulver for Mac OS X.

Like those aforementioned graphing calculators, this provides the multi-line input to display all variables set, expressions written, and answer values resulting.  There are plenty of other useful things it can perform on these beyond the physical limitations of those calculators, ranging from referring to more than one stored answer value (ANS on the TI) with its ability to reference any line, to going into previous lines and editing.
It is well-suited to perform the tasks without the extra weight of larger applications that would be overkill for this situation.
This is how I believe a standard calculator application should be done in personal computing.  We could still strive to implement visual and interactive elements for the real-world analogy, but if they keep in mind the advantages in usability a computer can offer over the physical calculators, we can have the best of both worlds.