Usability and public administration: Experiences of a difficult marriage

Approximately one and half year ago, the Italian authority which controls the software diffusion in Public Administrations (Autorita per l'Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione - AIPA) created a working group, the Usability Working Group, with the main purposes of assessing the extent to which both suppliers of computer technologies and the public administration pay attention to product usability and of surveying the level of comfort (or discomfort) the public administration users reach when interacting with new software systems. The group had also the duty of determining possible improvements and indicating how to obtain them in the short-medium term. Among the various activities of the group, two tests carried out for the public administration on two different development designs of interactive systems gave several hints. This paper reports about such tests and their outcomes. In particular, it concentrates on: 1) work methods of the design teams; 2) participation modes of the public administration in the design process; 3) users' evaluation of the system usability with respect to their implicit and explicit needs. Finally, the lessons learned from this experience are discussed.