Guidelines to Specify HCD Activities in the Call for Tender for Public Administration Websites

Despite studies that document the economic benefits of usability evaluation beyond the obvious improvement in user satisfaction, this research in human-computer interaction has too little impact on software development practice. Consequently, many software systems developed show a very poor usability. This is true equally for commercial software and for public administration web sites. Government websites have the objective of improving the interaction between citizens and public agencies or government functions. And yet, our study of software engineers revealed an important but previously hidden result, namely: during product development process companies focus almost exclusively on the requirements formally established in the Call for Tender (CfT) of a particular project. Generally, such requirements do not include usability and user experience (UX) and, thus, those qualities are neither designed into the project, nor evaluated on the way to completion and delivery. In this position paper, we review the motivation for including UX and usability requirements in CfTs, suggest some beginning steps for how to specify these qualities in the CfTs and show the initial effort for how to evaluate the efficacy of these specifications and guidelines.