Ergolight

Ergolight is a methodology for usability and resilience assurance, by incorporating human factors in the system design.
History
Originally, Ergolight was a name of an Israel-based company, which developed a software tool for usability testing. The tool implement a special method, called Ergolight method. The company was founded in 1997. In 1999 the company proposed two other tools: LabTester and WebTestr. To distinguish between the original method and the new methods, the original method was changed to GUI-Tester. Originally, ModeTester was part of GUI-Tester. Later, it was separated, and functionally extended.
As a result of the crisis of the High-Tech industry in 2000-2001, the company had to stop its commercial activity. The company renewed its research activity, doing studies for the Gordon Center for Systems Engineering at the Technion. The original methodology has been expanded from usability assurance to resilience assurance.
Motivation
The general motivation to develop Ergolight methodology was to help the industry develop software products that are more useful. Rohn explained that usefulness is the key to reducing the rate of product failure, development and training time and costs. The problem motivating this methodology is that users do not identify many usability deficiencies, and refrain from reporting on many other problems that they do identify.
Methods
The methodology comprises the following methods:
* GUI-Tester - was originally developed as a tool for testing the usability of Windows applications, at the customer's site. Today the method is used in ErgoSafe, in the form of guidelines for in-house resilience testing.
* LabTester - was originally developed as a tool for testing the usability of Windows applications, in dedicated usability labs. Today the method is used in ErgoSafe, in the form of guidelines for resilience-oriented usability testing.
* WebTester - was originally developed as a tool for testing the usability of websites, by statistical analysis of records of site navigation, which are routinely logged at the customer's server. Today the method is used for agile testing of the effectiveness of web sites, installed on Cloud and Edge mini-servers.
* ModeTester - was originally developed in a research study, to demonstrate the feasibility of detecting potential mode errors early at the design stage.Today the method is used in ErgoSafe, in the form of guidelines for assuring operator-machine cooperation.
* AlarmController - was originally developed in a research study, to demonstrate the feasibility of intelligent balancing the rate of nuisance alarms. Today the method is used in ErgoSafe, in a form of guidelines for alarm design.
Implementations
Ergolight methodology has been developed since 1997, using special tools for tracking and analyzing the user behavior. All the methods were demonstrated by special software programs, implemented on Windows platforms, using Delphi. The methods were based on models of the , incorporating descriptions of the user faults.
Other implementations include: Vividence, Keynote Systems, Dynatrace, and Microsoft.

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