Telephone-Based Menus: Evidence that Broader is Better than Deeper

Recent guidelines intended for designers of telephone menus for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems advocate keeping menus to four or fewer items. Additional items, the guidelines recommend, should appear on a secondary menu accessible from the first. The current study compared this deep-menu approach to a broad-menu approach wherein all the items appear on a single menu. Item selection times favored the broad-menu approach for both repeated and unique trials, casting some doubt on the validity of this particular guideline.