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.
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