Human Factors and Behavioral Science: Methods for Field Testing New Telephone Services

New telephone services involve more customer-system interaction than ever before, and making the use of these services easy and errorfree is a major goal of their development. Properly designed dialing plans, announcements, timings, tones, and instructions increase customer acceptance, minimize customer errors, and promote use of the service. The design of new services can be evaluated by coordinated studies that include: · Analysis of present services, · Interviews with customers, * Bell Laboratories. ®Copyright 1983, American Telephone & Telegraph Company. Copying in printed form for private use is permitted without payment of royalty provided that each reproduction is done without alteration and that the Journal reference and copyright notice are included on the first page. The title and abstract, but no other portions, of this paper may be copied or distributed royalty free by computer-based and other informationservice systems without further permission. Permission to reproduce or republish any other portion of this paper must be obtained from the Editor.