The objective of this project was to teach the Models of HCI class about the GOMS model such that the members of the class would have a basic understanding of what GOMS is, it's advantages and disadvantages , and an idea when to use and when not to use the GOMS model. We feel that we accomplished this in the four days that we had to teach class.

The first day was designed to introduce the class to the GOMS theory, the four different GOMS models, advantages and disadvantages, what GOMS gives you, and some applications of GOMS. The lecture notes can be found under the lecture notes heading on the main menu. The second day covered what a GOMS analysis looks like. In addition the class performed a small experiment on how to apply GOMS. This excercise can be found under the GOMS Task Analysis of a Watch off the main menu. The third day allowed the class the opportunity to use a software tool that allowed a visual representation of building a GOMS model for a task. Using this tool, they built a GOMS method of different ways of deleting a file in Windows 95. Information on this and the software tool can be found under QGOMS software QuickTime movie off the main menu. Finally on the fourth day we held a discussion which covered issues that some people were fuzzy on, discussed some of the limitations of GOMS and how to overcome some of them, and various other topics. The real audio discussion on these questions can be found under the critical review discussion on the main menu.

Although we feel that we accomplished our objective for this project, we realized that four people do not become experts on a subject in only a couple of weeks. Because of this it was hard trying to cover the total picture that depicted the true story of GOMS. As we found during the two weeks that we taught class, we overlooked certain aspects/issues of GOMS that members of the class wanted to know about. Unfortunately we also learned that a couple weeks is not enough time to completely understand the motivation behind GOMS and its theoretical foundations. Finally, we suggest developing a firm understanding of the differences between methods and sub-methods. We found that depending on the source, different authors used these terms interchangably. We believe that a method contains sub-methods but that a sub-method is itself a method. Further discussions of these differences are found in the GOMS literature.