Sign up ×  In a typical mobile phone IVR voicemail system you
are read out a long and (most likely impossible to remember or
recognise) telephone number before playing the message the
person who called you recorded.  This means that if the message
was valuable you have to replay the message to get the number
(assuming it isn't just saved on your phone anyway) and if it
wasn't then you've just wasted time listening to a number.
Edited to add: it reads the phone number which called you and
left a message, despite having it in your phone history anyway.
Why are these systems typically designed like this?
share|improve this question It's so old (convention) that they
hadn't heard the thing called design or user friendly. –  rk.
Jun 11 '13 at 12:28  4 Answers 4  up vote 7 down vote accepted
Don't look for a design rationale for everything. Many products
and services are simply badly designed.  In this case, voicemail
is a minor feature of phone service plans. No one picks a
service provider based on the qualit