Modelling Public Administration Portals

Portals for the public administration (PA) are Internet gateways leading to a broad range of services, devoted to a great number of users. The offered services can potentially be all the ones offered by the PA offices. The final users involved are potentially all the citizens, thus ranging from young people to retired ones, to impaired ones. The benefits offered by putting PA services on the Internet are various: a reduced number of employees at the PA offices, an increased number of citizens that can interact with the PA, immediately available information (news, laws, regulations), faster data integration in PA informative systems, and overall costs reductions (citizen mobility, time consumption, etc.). Such benefits are driving a wide diffusion of PA portals with an increasing number of accesses and users (Reis, 2005). Although the number of PA portals available is increasing, their use by citizens is still limited due to usability problems and the low quality of the offered services To obtain usable PA portals, a design methodology that considers the user interaction in the early development phases must be adopted (Conallen, 2003). This already happens for e-commerce Web sites (Nielsen, 1999). Conversely, as usually happens with standard development tools for portals, accessibility, and usability issues are faced at the end of the PA portals development process, with high costs and growing times to the final release. Focusing on usability issues, the purpose of our article is twofold: (i) analyzing requirements and standard method-ologies to design the user interaction in such environment, and (ii) proposing a design methodology to solve usability problems. Usual methods model some navigation aspects, but they are not focused on usability and layout design issues; neither do they make the comprehension of the navigation aspects easier. In order to face user experience problems and speed-up the whole development process, we designed a methodology (Prete, Foglia, & Zanda, 2005a, 2005b) and a set of tools for the rapid development and deployment of PA portals. In the following, we identify main PA portals requirements. Then, we describe methodologies to design and develop Web sites and PA portals and present our methodology to rapidly develop and deploy usable PA portals. Finally, we draw conclusions. Due to their importance, most of the PA central offices have analyzed the functional requirements of PA portals (Reis, 2005). They identified classes of services, classes of users, and the sophistication degree. Classes of services identify …