In the beginning, there was the answering machine. Its operation was simple. Some people wouldn’t leave messages, claiming they “don’t like to talk to machines,” but I never met anyone who couldn’t figure out what to do with one.
I took a lovely hand-me-down answering machine to college. It sported the fake wood grain that was popular in the 80’s, particularly on cars. It had one tape for incoming messages and one for the outgoing message, which was handy and resulted in better sound quality than the digital equivalents of the mid-90’s. One could even check messages on it remotely. Around 2000 I threw it out in favor of smaller and better things; I wish I hadn’t.
Answering machines worked nicely for about a quarter century. Then came digital voicemail systems, mobile phones, and Shirley (probably not her real name), the Helpful Voicemail Lady. I imagine you’ve met her:

“After the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up or press pound for more options. [inexplicably long pause] To leave a callback number, press 5.”

I have never dared to press 5.
It’s possible that someone did research and found a real need for these Instructions, but I’d be surprised. It seems more likely that someone stuck them in because she could - perhaps Shirley herself, though I suspect she’s innocent. I’m not averse to providing options, but when they serve only a fraction of telephone users (as I suspect they do) they should be provided in a manner that doesn’t get in everyone else’s way. (The need for them is what we often call an edge case. It’s easy but dangerous to get caught up in edge cases, because the last thing you want to do is design for them at the expense of the core use cases.)
Some carriers (Sprint, AT&T/Cingular, and possibly T-Mobile) allow you to bypass Shirley by pressing 1; Sprint goes so far as to tell you about it. In the past my outgoing message has begun, “Press 1 to skip to the beep.” Instructions for the Instructions.
The iPhone has already been lauded for bringing Apple simplicity to the mobile phone market, but I think of my outgoing voicemail message as AT&T’s territory. To my surprise and delight, here’s what happens after the outgoing message when you call an iPhone user:

[beep]

Thanks, Apple.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 6:36 pm and is filed under General, Usability. 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.