The Black List....

Someone at the VUI Designers Yahoogroups discussion board asked about why deployed VUIs out there continue to include the tired phase of, "Please listen carefully as our options have changed." As some in the discussion pointed out, the phrase is either passively included (like all bad practices, people are doing it because other people are doing it), or actively added because someone in the design committee is afraid that power users will not listen to the options offered and will press the wrong old key and then get lost....

I suggest that next time you find yourself in a position of having to explain why you do not agree to including the prompt, simply explain your position as follows: Power users do not listen to prompts, and will certainly not notice the white noise language of "Please listen carefully as our options have changed" -- especially if it is played every time they call. The only way they will learn that an option has changed is for them to get lost once or twice. If there was indeed a drastic menu change and you desperately needed your callers to notice it, use something far more attention grabbing than some language signal the change (a double dings sound followed by an announcement that menu options had changed) -- and use it only when something has really changed, and for a limited period of time. And if you were really smart and cared about your callers, you would remember who has already listened to the menu change notification and so does not need to be bothered with it every time they called.

Here a few more expressions that I propose should be banned from a VUI design:

• "Your call is very important to us"
• "You can interrupt me at any time"
• "For English, press one"
• "Press X, NOW!" ("Now" being the thing to ban, especially in the context of listing a list of options to press)
• "Please select from the following menu options"

Let me know if you can think of more....