The addition of iMessage has been a huge success for Apple, with customers sending billions of iMessages among their iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches and Macs. I’ve read many ways that Apple could improve iMessage; cross ecosystem apps, better group messaging and reliable time stamps across devices, to name a few.

The Messages App itself, though, has seen comparably little improvement since the addition of landscape support. Recently, my spouse inadvertently uncovered an area in need of improvement.

If you have a text or iMessage conversation with multiple numbers for the same contact, it is unclear which is which. So if you message with ‘Jane Work’ and ‘Jane iPhone’ in Messages, you’ll have two threads labeled the as a non-distinctive ‘Jane’.

iOS Messages app should add a quick and visual method to distinguish between two numbers with the same contact. Here are a few suggestions on how this could be accomplished.

One method would be to add the label to the name, so you would see ‘Jane Work’ and ‘Jane iPhone’ in the list view and the conversation view. Another way would be to thread the two. In list view, you would see ‘Jane (2)’ and tapping that would allow you to choose between ‘Work’ and ‘iPhone’, in our example. Lastly, it could be adjusted by color, allowing a user selectable color for any individual conversation in Messages – a popular feature for instant messaging clients.

Any of the above methods would provide a faster and more intuitive way to tell the difference between conversations with different numbers from the same contact.