Telecom junkies use the term “IVR” to refer to the “press 1 to speak to a representative …” phone systems we all have to deal with when we dial in to talk to tech support or the airlines or our bank. The letters in the acronym stand for interactive voice response system. We’ve spent a lot of time over the years helping clients tweak their IVRs for better end-user experience.

Before we go further a secret must be imparted. Your users hate your IVR. You spend time and money getting your IVR up and running. But, alas. Your users hate your IVR. (There are good structural reasons for why your users hate your IVR, btw; more about that in a later post.)

That being the case, are there IVR best practices? There are. And the two such practices we’ll explore here go by the labels ellipsis and proximity. For examples of both we’ll turn to CapitalOne’s credit card customer service line at 1 (800) 955 - 7070. When we dial in, we hear this. Go ahead. Click and listen

We enter our credit number and then we hear this. Go ahead. Click again.

So notice what’s not here? Menu items 3, 4, 5 have no “for” at the beginning. Nor do they have a “press” towards the end. “Ellipsis” means leaving stuff out. Just like menu items 3, 4, 5. Take a look at the transcript.

Not exciting. But a perceptually faster — and even smoother — user experience than it otherwise would be. By getting rid of six words.

“Six words? That’s only fractions of a second!” I know. But this sort of stuff winds up having a larger perceptual impact than it should. Leafing through the data from conversation analysis, intonation and research areas that quantify this stuff doesn’t really make it any easier to explain what’s going on. But it’s there. Use ellipsis to your advantage. And make your users hate you less.

We borrow “proximity” from the GUI usability folks who in turn borrow it from the cognitive psych types who study this stuff. We tend to see stuff that’s near other stuff as clumping together. In our case our users can’t see anything. They can only listen. But the length of the pauses we build into the IVR combine with the word order of our prompts to yield something similar to the clumping proximity principle from gestalt psychology.

Consider that each of the menu options “to pay by phone, press 1″, “for recent transactions, press 2″, etc, above, could have been written instead as “press 1 to pay by phone”, “press 2 for recent transactions”, etc. What’s the difference?

The menu options as they are today put users categories like “recent transactions” first and verbal invitations like “press 2″ last. This is a good thing. Reversing the order with the verbal invitations first and the user categories last opens up enough of a window for users to forget which key it is that you wanted them to press by the time they’re done listening to the full name of the category. (Why this is the case, btw, has to do with the relative lengths of pauses between what are written above as commas within a menu item and semicolons between different items.)

So there they are. Ellipsis and proximity. Slight differences in language and language use that speed up the perception of experience and protect us from our own forgetfulness.

These first two are freebies. If there’s any interest then we can visit more best practices in later posts.

No related posts.