VALIDATING THE APPLICATION OF ERGONOMICS TO EQUIPMENT DESIGN: A CASE STUDY?

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Abstract
The place of validation in the practice of ergonomics is discussed, and it is suggested that too little attention has been paid to this topic. An illustrative experiment is described in which some aspects of the ergonomic re-design of a digital computer console were validated. Two computer systems, identical save for the control console of one having been re-designed according to ergonomic principles, were available. The performances of ten operators on the two consoles wore compared by means of a specially prepared computer programme, which presented the operator's task and recorded both the time taken and the errors made. For three out of five common operations, the re-designed console was found to give significantly greater speed, and the other two operations showed similar though nonsignificant trends. No significant differences appeared between errors on the two consoles; some reasons are suggested for this, in particular the limited computer time (hence experimental time) available. The implications of those results are discussed and it is concluded that a measure of validation hag been achieved in this particular case of equipment design.

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