Voice User Interface Design VUI

A friend of mine sent me this, and I thought it was really funny. It seems IVRs are entering prime time television not only in the US (as seen in the “Saturday Night Live” sketches of Julie) but in other countries too. It is interesting how even though we all speak different languages, we always somehow manage to repeat the same mistakes in any language, don’t you think?

Unfortunately, the interaction isn’t that far off from some of the actual live calls I’ve heard from systems our there in productions – specially trying to avoid transferring the caller, but we’re all working on fixing that, right?

You can watch the video below, and if you don’t speak French, here’s a brief transcript of the interaction so you can read and weep:

• “Lady” calls in but person isn’t available (gets voicemail message)
• Attempts to leave voice message but system interrupts with “If you’re satisfied with your message, press 1.”
• Caller says she isn’t satisfied and again is interrupted by “To record it again, press 2.”
• Caller presses 2… and the advanced dialog begins… the system says “You’ve pressed 2. If you’re satisfied with choosing 2, press 1.”
• Caller presses 1, system says “You’ve pressed 1. Press 3 if you’ve chosen 1 because you’re satisifed with your message. Or 4 if you’ve chosen 1 because you’re satisfied with pressing 2 because you’re not satisfied with your message.”
• Caller hesitates to system helps with “Press 5 if you want 10 more seconds to press 3 because you want 2, or press 6 for 10 seconds to press 4 because you want 1 because you would like 2. Press 7 to start over. 8 to hear this again. Or 9 to not hear it anymore.”
• Caller presses 7 so system asks “Was that 9?”
• You get the picture…

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 9:02 am and is filed under Dialog Design, Fun Stuff, Other Languages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.