Articles and talks

Spain's government ignores 'not invented here' usability advice

by Louise Ferguson, October 2002

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. Article this month from the Spanish press, including El País and El Mundo review developments since the site 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. Industry sources report that the project cost around €2 million for the initial development and has a total budget of €6 million.

But instead of abolishing or bypassing bureaucratic complexity, the portal has become 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 specialist websites run by IT professionals, including Terremoto, Think Tank and BarraPunto. Articles in the national press have also severely criticise 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.

Since the site's launch, 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 Spanish usability rumour mill suggests some surprisingly large and mainstream outfits may be responsible for the original design. However, the same anonymous 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.

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