Gray, John, Stuart, Lawrence, & Atwood, 1995

Gray, W. D., John, B. E., Stuart, R., Lawrence, D., & Atwood, M. E. (1995). GOMS meets the phone company: Analytic modeling applied to real-world problems. In R. M. Baecker, J. Grudin, W. A. S. Buxton, & S. Greenberg (Eds.), Readings in human-computer interaction: Toward the year 2000, (Second ed., pp. 634-639). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Increase.

GOMS Meets the Phone Company: Analytic Modeling Applied to Real-world Problems

GOMS analyses were used to interpret some perplexing data from a field evaluation of two telephone operator workstations. The new workstation is ergonomically superior to the old and is preferred by all who have used it. Despite these advantages telephone operators who use the new workstation are not faster than those who use the old but are, in fact, significantly slower. This bewildering result makes sense when seen with the aid of GOMS. With GOMS we can see that very few of the eliminated key-strokes or ergonomic advantages affect tasks that determine the operator's work time. Indeed, GOMS shows that some presumed procedural improvements have the contrary effect of increasing the time an operator spends handling a phone call. We concluded that if GOMS had been done early on, then the task, not the workstation, would have been redesigned.