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Use the following guidelines when designing your applications that use menus.
Number of menu choices
Too many menu choices presented at once may confuse callers. In general, do not offer more than four or five choices in a single menu.
If you have more than four or five choices, separate them into small related groups and present more than one menu. For example, if you are giving information on seven parks, do not list them all in one menu. Your first menu could separate them into groups, and say:
"For parks with camping facilities, press 1
For other parks, press 2"
If the caller presses 1:
"For Stony Ridge, press 1
For Cantwell Cliffs, press 2
For Old Man's Cave, press 3"
If the caller presses 2:
"For Seneca Rocks, press 1
For Rialto Beach, press 2
For Lugano Falls, press 3
For Monroe Bluff, press 4"
In certain cases, it might be acceptable to present more than five menu choices. If all callers are trained in using your voice response system, or if they use the system frequently, having longer menus may save time, as long as you allow callers to dial through or barge-in to interrupt the menu prompt.
Menu choice sequence
To decrease the call length, present the most likely menu choice first, the second most likely second, and so on. If you do not know the preferred order, make a guess and adjust if necessary during application testing.
Numbered menu options
When presenting menu options that a caller can choose by number, present them in numerical order. Avoid skipping numbers.
If you change the sequence of your menu to present the more likely choices sooner, be sure to change the numbers of the menu prompts so that the caller can choose the first option by selecting 1, the second by selecting 2, and so on.
Keep in mind that experienced callers, and those with user guides, probably do not listen to all menu prompts. When you change one or more menus in your application, consider adding an announcement during the greeting, such as "The menu has changed; please listen carefully." After some time, you can remove this message.
Subdivided menu options
If your menu tree is complex, or you think that callers will want to get information from many different menus, give callers a choice to move to a different menu. You could add a choice to allow callers to go back to the previous menu, or a choice that would allow callers to go to the top of the menu tree. For example:
"For parks with camping facilities, press 1
For other parks, press 2"
< 1 >
"For Stony Ridge, press 1
For Cantwell Cliffs, press 2
For Old Man's Cave, press 3
For the previous menu, press 4"
< 2 >
"Cantwell Cliffs offers 15 tent camping sites, each with a water spigot. Cooking fires are permitted. Toilet and shower facilities are available. Reservations are accepted from April first through November first."
"To make a reservation, press 1
For directions, press 2
For the previous menu, press 3
To start at the beginning, press 4"
Although the menu should automatically repeat if the caller does not respond, you could include an option like "To repeat the menu, press 9."
