Structural characteristics of the web and its impact on usability. Analysis of the case in the municipal portals of the Community of Madrid

Analysis of the structural characteristics of the web and its impact in usability, through a comparative study done during the year 2008, of the official web portals of the 17 municipalities with more than 50.000 inhabitants in the "Comunidad de Madrid". The main objectives are: to empirically evaluate this aspects in comparison with the ideal standards; to establish, through comparison, possible tendencies; and to propose a coherent and extrapolable model for similar works. The results show that most web portals have hierarchic structure and that the use of sub-webs is quite significant. Most of the content organization criteria are user centered, a majority have a web map that reflects the site structure and all of them use a significant URL. We infer, as main conclusions: a) the treatment of the structural usability factors shows a global level above 70% of the ideal values; b) the main error in usability is the excessive number of subwebs that play down the consistency of the web portals; c) the information variety predominates over the depth of the information; d) the results between city councils are very homogeneous.