Visual voice-mail

Seriously, why wasn’t visual voice-mail widespread long before the iPhone? Apple may be the best company when it comes to bringing decent human-machine interaction to market. (They’ve got plenty of room for improvement, but they’re still the best.) But this “innovation” isn’t so out-of-the-box and innovative that it needed Apple to make it happen. Anyone can probably make a long list off the top of their heads of simple devices and ways they are a pain to use. Many of these things don’t take creativity or innovation to fix. They don’t require studying human-machine interaction. (Though there’d be additional value in that.) They require simply the willingness to make your product less painful for the user.