Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Phone menus
Raised as a usability problem by 37 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 31 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 36 complaints
- Phone menus are designed to block reaching a human agent2026-05-10
- Automated phone menus are grindingly slow to get through and hard to accomplish anything with2026-04-11
- Menu wandering ends in a promised text link that never arrives and a dropped call2025-07-29
- Picking a menu item on phones takes separate tap, scroll, and tap steps2025-03-03
- Phone menus are tedious enough that people want someone else to navigate them2024-08-25
- Phone menu prompts take minutes to listen through before reaching the needed option2024-08-14
- Phone menus are confusing, deliberately tiring, and voice menus are infuriating to use2024-02-03
- Long phone menus of number presses end in disconnects or never reach a human2024-01-29
- Unknown-number calls are so frequent that legitimate calls like doctors' get ignored2023-05-24
- Speech-only phone menus can never help with what callers want2023-05-01
- Must sit through menus and reminders, then hack way to reach a human2023-03-18
- Phone bots repeat questions already answered and ignore stated requests2023-02-07
- Repeated hold-line messages interrupt the music and mislead callers into thinking they were connected2022-11-02
- Lists the most common option last and offers no 'other' choice2022-03-24
- Automated phone menus have no path to a human, forcing repeated 'Operator' or cursing2022-03-24
- Long covid recorded messages block reaching a real person during urgent calls2021-12-10
- Spends 20 minutes wading through automated menu options before reaching a human2021-09-20
- Must wade through several menu levels to reach a human operator2021-05-04
- Phone menus are designed to slow callers down and block reaching a human2021-05-04
- Small buttons cause wrong presses; no reset leaves user stuck with no clear recovery2021-02-05
- Phone menus require pressing buttons that are hard to reach or unavailable on some phones2020-10-26
- Voice prompts add extra waiting and repeat options, and fail to recognize speech2020-10-26
- Getting past automated phone menus to reach a live person is maddening and frustrating2020-10-01
- Phone menus are slow and tedious, and they make reaching a human painful2020-07-14
- Automated phone menus make people struggle to reach a human2020-06-10
- Menus change and waste time, hiding the button that skips to an agent2019-06-26
- Phone menus are deliberately made a maze so callers give up or stay on hold2019-06-26
- Asked to re-enter account details already given, and systems hang up aggressively2018-11-02
- Must repeat account details to the menu and again to a person, then retry steps2018-06-08
- Elderly callers are forced through automated phone menus instead of reaching a human2018-06-08
- Phone menus make it difficult to reach the right department or get help2018-05-08
- Must call several times in a row and wait for staff to pick up2018-04-13
- Cannot reach a human; phone menus loop without an escape to a person2018-02-22
- Callers can't get past voice-only menus and must shout to reach a person2017-11-20
- Robocall menu lacks the option needed, so callers get routed to wrong people2017-11-11
- Tech support walks callers through many useless basic steps before help2010-02-25