Spain's government ignores 'not invented here' usability advice
The Spanish government's main Internet portal, administracion.es, still suffers from innumerable usability and accessibility problems a year after its launch raised protests from politicians and usability practitioners alike. An article this month from Spanish national newspaper El Mundo takes a look back over developments since the site - which cost €2 million for the initial development and has a total budget of €6 million, according to industry sources - first hit the headlines.

Administracion.es, launched in September 2001, was designed to be the main interface between Spanish citizens and the country's immensely complex, paper-based and queue-driven administration - an alternative strategy to re-engineering the government's administrative processes, or so it seemed. At the site's launch, Spanish newspaper El País (Ciberpaís supplement) reported - as per press release - that some 49 administrative procedures could now be performed online.

But instead of abolishing or bypassing bureaucratic complexity, the portal became a national laughing stock, leading to letters of protest from usability and information architecture professionals in national newspapers and questions to ministers in the Spanish Senate. Statements of protest from usability and information architecture professionals appeared on Spanish websites Terremoto, Think Tank and BarraPunto, as well as in the national press, severely criticising site usability and accessibility.

Spanish web designers were quick to offer their advice on improving the usability and accessibility aspects of the site. One widely-publicised proposal for a two-stage development path to improve the site was put forward by local usability duo Think Tank, who supported their redesign with an outline rationale, available on the same site. Think Tank's input has been ignored to date by an administration seemingly suffering from the 'not invented here' syndrome, and one year on El Mundo reports no discernible improvement to the site, a fact confirmed by a visit to the site.

"I've asked for the minister to appear and answer questions on this issue," said Félix Lavilla, Spanish senator and spokesman for the Socialist group on the Spanish Senate's Information Society Committee, to El Mundo ealier this month. "To spend all this money for a site with such poor design, poor functionality, poor accessibility and which is never updated, is quite frankly shameful". In an interview for the Spanish Internaut Association, Lavilla had previously been critical of the delays in putting the site together - it was reportedly already on the drawing board in 1999, as part of what Lavilla refers to as the "non-existent" but nevertheless costly "Info XXI Action Plan".

Since the site's laumch, it has proved exceedingly difficult to discover who was responsible for the site design - nobody appears willing to claim this baby as their own. The source code reveals little, while the Spanish usability rumour mill suggests some surprisingly large and mainstream outfits may were responsible for the original design. However, the same sources suggest that that the design may have suffered 'institutional interference' at some point prior to launch, which may explain the reticence of the various parties to step forward.

According to a government press release, the site received a total of around 800,000 visitors over its first two months of operation. (In Spanish)