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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.
Suhm et al. (Sat,) studied this question.