Curing the menu blues in touch-tone voice interfaces

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a study on touch-tone menu design. In particular, we investigated whether short or long menus route callers more efficiently to the destination that can handle the call. A short menu offers a small number of broad selections, while a long menu offers a larger number of more specific choices. Results obtained from thousands of live calls to a commercial customer service center, show that callers route themselves more effectively using the long menu. In addition, in complex voice interfaces, using long menus reduces the number of menu layers required, thus reducing the need to navigate through multiple menu layers, one of the most severe usability problems of existing touch-tone interfaces.

REFERENCES

• 1: Balentine, B. and Morgan, D. P., "How to Build a Speech Recognition Application", Enterprise Integration Group, San Ramon, CA, 1999.
• 2: Fay, D. "User Acceptance of Automatic Speech Recognition in Telephone Services," in: International Conference on Spoken Language Systems ICSLP, 1994, Yokohama, Japan, pp. 1303 - 1306.
• 3: Miller, G. A., "The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity For Processing Information", Psychological Science, 1956, Vol. 63, pp. 81-97.
• 4: T. L. Roberts , G. Engelbeck, The effects of device technology on the usability of advanced telephone functions, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Wings for the mind, p.331-337, March 1989
• 5: Gregory R. Tatchell, Problems with the existing telephony customer interface: the pending eclipse of touch-tone and dial-tone, Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.242-243, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/257089.257302]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Haptic I/O

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Input devices and strategies (e.g., mouse, touchscreen)

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
multimodal user interfaces, speech user interfaces, telephone voice user interfaces, touch-tone menus