John, There are very old semi-standards that companies such as the pre-breakup AT&T published that also included menu structure guidelines.
In practice, though, these are not used widely enough to call them standards. In addition, your example actually mixes a voicemail-type system references with other more general conventions. So, a little more context would be helpful to know what you are after. I've designed and built many DTMF and speech systems and many good and bad usages abound. In general, though, for customer service or other information systems, yes, keys 1 - 6 are used for call reason sorts of options, 8 or * can be used for going back one level or to the main menu, 9 can be used to end the call, and # for variable length digit string entry termination. In voicemail systems, while there should have been a standard based on or inspired by the Audix system, in reality many companies have done wonders in butchering what could be a straightforward interface. To step into fantasyland for a moment though, for the menus, the same options above could apply. Once listening to a message, 1 can be "rewind", 3 can be "fast forward", 5 can be message meta-data (calling number, date, time), 7 can be "delete", 8 can be "reply to", 9 can "store" the message, * can be "exit" to the menu, and # can "skip" to the next message. While no real standard exists, these are similar enough to many existing systems to be quickly learnable, IMO. Also, though you didn't ask, 0 should always get the caller to a person. Or at least to something helpful if not. Phillip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36742 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
