Voicemail is a digital junk drawer.

Why the iPhone’s voicemail UX needs a rethink—and how to fix it.

Voicemail is the junk drawer of communication—ignored, never checked, never noticed. Until someone complains it’s full…

This always comes as a surprise to me. My iPhone holds hundreds of thousands of photos, and countless apps. Yet there’s this bizarrely tiny storage limit for voicemails. To free up storage, I am painstakingly required to delete each message one by one.

Here’s why the iPhone’s voicemail UX needs a rethink—and how to fix it:

What are the issues?

The iPhone’s voicemail UX fails for two main reasons:

1. It doesn’t align to user expectations.

2. Deleting voicemail requires effort.

1. Voicemail UX doesn’t align to user expectations

People expect voicemail to work like every other part of their phone experience, but it doesn’t.

Storage — Voicemail is the only app on my phone that runs into storage issues (and doesn’t seem to be tied to iCloud’s storage plan).

Bulk Actions — Voicemails are treated like bespoke treasures and I can’t intuitively take any bulk actions on them.

Failure — Generally, apps prevent flat out failure and people expect some leeway. But if someone’s voicemail is full, it fails — nobody can leave a message.

2. Deleting voicemail requires effort.

The voicemail app seems to have been designed with the assumption that voicemails are precious. But for me, about 90% of my voicemails are spam; another 8% are useless (or redundant with texts), leaving only ~2% that are relevant…

For those 2%, nothing happens once I’ve read or listened to them, so even those accumulate. To clear my voicemail box, I have to manually delete each voicemail one at a time. There are three different ways to delete a voicemail, but all require selecting each email individually:

Once deleted, voicemails still aren’t really deleted. They just move to the “deleted” folder and continue to take up space. To really delete a voicemail, one has to then delete the “deleted voicemails” from the “deleted” folder. At least for this, there is a “clear all” function, but that then requires another confirmation.

What are the constraints?

It seems the storage limit for voicemails is imposed by carriers (who actually handle voicemail). But nobody thinks about their carrier beyond signal strength and a monthly payment, so this just feels weird and incongruent with every other part of the phone UX. But let’s just assume the current storage space is a fixed constraint.

How can we design better solutions?

Good design works around (or with) constraints. These are a few key principles I use when thinking about potential design solutions:

1. Reduce effort

2. Align with expectations

3. Meet people where they are

4. Prevent failure

5. Deliver joy

1. Reduce effort

Make things as easy as possible for people. Voicemail transcription to text is a good example of this because it provides multiple ways to consume a message (even if it’s quality isn’t always so great). Ideas:

• Make it easy to delete voicemail (including “delete all” capability at the top level). Make “listen/read” the first order action and “delete” the next default action (with “save” as an alternate action).

• Auto-delete everything in the “deleted” folder after 30 days.

• Or replace the deleted messages folder with a temporary “undo delete” option.

• Automatically “archive” old voicemails, voicemails from non-contacts, or voicemails you’ve already listened to.

• Heck, go as far as systematically deleting any messages that a person hasn’t indicated are special after 30 days.

2. Align with expectations

Understand how people expect a feature to work, consider parallel experiences, and design interfaces that align with users' mental models. Ideas:

• Make storage a non-issue for people: Reduce file size of voicemails, and/or compress and store messages somewhere else on the phone.

• Let people pay to make the problem go away: While we may begrudge this, people are accustomed to paying for additional storage.

• Pattern-match to existing apps: Reuse related interactions and functionality from text messaging (or other apps).

3. Meet people where they are

Where do people spend their time? What are their patterns of usage? How does your app fit into that? What pulls them into the app, what do they do there, and where do they go afterwards? Ideas:

• Voicemail is not a destination — people only go to voicemail if they get a notification for a new message. If a person’s voicemail box is almost full, send a system-level notification so that they see it.

4. Prevent failure

Don’t let experiences fail fully. This is like the empty gas tank light on a car — when the light comes on, there is still enough gas to get you to a gas station.
You still want to allow messages to come through so that you don’t end up blocking the 2% of important messages. Ideas:

• Regularly free up space (whether through system-level prompts, default deleting, etc.)

• Reserve a holding tank for 1-2 messages.

• If voicemail is full, route callers to send a text message.

5. Deliver Joy

Look for opportunities to delight people. Ideas:

• Provide an easy way to save special voicemails — make it feel like safely tucking away a keepsake.

• Make voicemails intuitive to re-find and special to listen to again.

• Bring in additional context that makes a voicemail feel like a memory, rather than an audio file. If someone saves a message from a contact, and there are any photos of that contact, make a slideshow (like the photos app).

Why could better UX be the work-around for limited storage?

There are clearly hundreds of different approaches one could take to improve the user experience of voicemails on modern phones. The ideas mentioned above are just some of many. Voicemail may seem like a weird choice to even think about in our current, shiny AI-centered world. But it’s still a recurring pain point for me and strikes me as odd that it’s not a solved problem.

Rather than just rattling off a bunch of seemingly random ideas to improve the iPhone’s voicemail UX, I shared the ideas with some structure to explain why these ideas came to mind for me.

Hopefully the principles behind the ideas are universal enough to apply to your own products. Constraints will always exist, but don’t have to negatively impact the user experience. Good design creatively works around these constraints to deliver simple, intuitive, delightful experiences.

---