Rewording and Restructuring Menu Options (ATA Experiment 109)

PxD is partnering with Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) to help improve the effectiveness of their voice-based mobile-phone advisory service, the 8028 hotline, by conducting continuous iterations and experiments, as well as by making suggestions for improvements to and customization of the service. The service has millions of registered farmers and represents the first in Africa to be maintained by a government entity at such a large scale.

The 8028 hotline Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system uses phone key navigation. Menu options for advisory content were labeled using technical or scientific terminology (e.g., “Pre-planting”). Qualitative investigations, including focus group discussions and in-depth interviews, revealed that many farmers did not understand these labels. As a result, they often could not predict what kind of advice each menu would include. This likely limited their ability to access the information most relevant to them and may have reduced the overall usefulness of the service. While farmers showed a reasonable distribution of preferences across crop-specific menus in qualitative investigations, most callers defaulted to pressing option 1 in the main menu—possibly because they didn’t fully understand the meaning or purpose of the other options.

Findings from “Rotate Menu Seasonally (ATA Experiment 108)” demonstrated that users’ choices were strongly influenced by menu position; here we examine whether unclear menu labeling also affects user behavior. To improve content access, we tested whether rewording and restructuring how menu options are presented would help users to make more informed choices to access relevant content. We find limited evidence that rewording menu options led to changes in user behavior; the majority of users still selected the first menu option. The experiment was conducted outside the seasonal crop menu rotation experiment, which means option 1 consistently referred to "pre-planting"—a possible reason for the persistent default behavior.