AN EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF PREFERENCES FOR DATA-ENTRY METHOD IN AUTOMATED TELEPHONE SERVICES

This paper reports an experiment to investigate users' preferences amo ngst three modes of data entry in an automated home shopping service: DTMF input on the telephone keypad, and isolated word (IW) and connect ed word (CW) speech input. Preferences were measured both by means of attitude questionnaires and by giving participants an explicit choice among the three versions of the service once they had experienced them all. Users' attitudes to the service with a given mode of data entry were found to vary according to their cognitive skills (verbal and spa tial abilities) and according to whether they had previously experienc ed a different data entry mode. Overall, DTMF and CW were rated simila rly, and were strongly preferred to IW. Implications of these findings for the implementation of telephone-based services are discussed.