The benefits of augmenting telephone voice menu navigation with visual browsing and search

Automatic interactive voice response (IVR) based telephone routing has long been recognized as a frustrating interaction experience. This paper presents a series of experiments examining the benefits of augmenting telephone voice menus with coordinated visual displays and keyword search. The first experiment qualitatively studied callers' experience of having a visual menu on a screen in synchronization with the telephone voice menu tree navigation. The second experiment quantitatively measured callers' performance in time and accuracy with and without visual display augmentation. The third experiment tested keyword search in comparison to visual browsing of telephone menu trees. Study participants uniformly and enthusiastically liked the visual augmentation of voice menus. On average with visual augmentation callers could navigate phone trees 36% faster with 75% fewer errors, and made choices ahead of the voice menu over 60% of the time. Search vs. browsing had similar navigation performance but offered different and complementary user experiences. Overall our studies conclude that telephone voice menu navigation can be significantly improved with a visual channel augmentation, resulting in both business cost reduction and user experience satisfaction.