How Usable is Your Web Site?
Dan Blacharski - IT World - eCommerce in the Enterprise - Feb. 12, 2002
Web site metrics can supply some insight into your most and least popular pages, your visitors'
point of origin, and the times of their visits. ErgoLight (http://ergolight.har-el.com), a Haifa-based company called,
takes Web metrics a step further with a new idea that's worth trying out. The company's usability reports really tell you what it's
like to be an end user.
Regardless of how you get your information -- from your hosting service, an in-house software package, or a service like ErgoLight
-- it all begins at your server logs. Server logs are incomprehensible in raw form, but the data can be transformed
into nifty charts and graphs (i.e., what you get from your hosting service) that make much more sense. ErgoLight's approach
transcends charts and graphs. Their usability rating of your site indicates difficult pages to find, pages that may be difficult to read or comprehend, and the pages likely to be abandoned due to long download time. Besides the usual charts and graphs, ErgoLight delivers a narrative explanation of each usability rating.
ErgoLight isn't a piece of loaded software; they operate more like an ASP. Besides the automatically generated diagnosis, the reports incorporate a human factor that provides better insight into the results and recommendations for making the pages easier to navigate. The process is quite simple too. You send them your server logs, they analyze them, and then send a report back.
The full article:
http://www.itworld.com/nl/ecom_in_ent/02122002/
Lior Eilam - Haaretz - Jan. 7, 2000
Who among us did not experience the need to operate an unfriendly software?
The more features a software product has, the harder it is to use. "Up
to 30% of the user actions are erroneous" says Avi Harel, the company founder.
The challenge is to find the way that software products will respond gracefully
to the high rate of user errors.
ErgoLight developed a set of tools that enables software developers
to find out if the end users have difficulties in operating the software
and the reasons for these difficulties...
Existing tools used for software testing are operated by software testers
and therefore are not adequate for user testing. Typical software tester
cannot represent the users, because they already know how to operate the
tested product and therefore do not experience the same difficulties that
real users do. ErgoLight tools, on the other hand are used to track and
analyze the actions of real users.
Among ErgoLight competitors are human factors engineers who claim to
guarantee high level of usability by proper design. "The user behavior
is always unexpected, even for the best designers", says Harel. Rather
than compete, usability professional can take advantage of ErgoLight tools,
to help them in the product design.
Another product developed by ErgoLight enables validation of safety
critical systems, such as medical or transportation control systems. "For
each case of an accident caused by a user error, there are about 100 instances
of 'almost accidents", says Harel. "By identifying the 'almost accident'
instances, developers of safety critical systems can change the product
design so that to prevent accidents".
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