Surveys about automated telephone answering systems, known as interactive voice response systems or IVRs, report high levels of dissatisfaction, especially among older users. To identify the problems IVR users experience, 22 community-dwelling senior women and 22 female university students were monitored while they performed the same six real IVR tasks. As expected, old age had a negative impact on performance, but seniors were polarized into very poor and very good performers. Seniors gave lower usability ratings than young people; only young users gave high ratings to the one voice-activated system. Users' problems were mostly caused by design flaws in the IVR systems, especially ambiguous choices or instructions, and too-rapid automated voices. Young and old participants had similar complaints, but most young users overcame all difficulties, while the majority of seniors failed because of age-related losses in capacities. The solution is not special products for the old, but universal design that will make IVRs and other technological products more usable for everyone.
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