Sabadell's e-government portal, designed so people don't get lost

Sabadell is one of Catalonia's largest cities, with 224,589 residents. Its e-government portal is where residents, businesses and organisations submit applications, check their case files, receive notifications and access the Council's official information, from the public notice board to bylaws or the register of contractors. In 2024, the Technology and Organisational Transformation Service decided to redesign it completely. A consultant who had worked with us on the e-government portal for the Port of Barcelona knew our methodology and our deliverables, and recommended us. The Council invited us to take part in the open tender, and we won it.

The portal we had to redesign had grown by accumulation: a very long side menu, sections ordered by the internal organisation chart, a separate folder for residents, organisations, businesses and suppliers, and procedures that were hard to find unless you already knew their name. The user experience was poor, it didn't work well on mobile, and accessibility needed reinforcing to meet what the regulations require of a public administration.

The brief asked for everything at once. Paperwork had to come before information, and any content had to be reachable in three clicks at most. It also had to meet the European Accessibility Directive, Royal Decree 1112/2018 and the WCAG, align the design with the Council's corporate image, and leave templates its team could maintain. It also meant writing the sections the law requires of an e-government portal that Sabadell didn't yet have. And we were designing it, but another team would build it: every deliverable had to be precise, with legal language sitting alongside language anyone could understand.

We started with the information architecture. We inventoried all of the portal's content and reorganised it into three main blocks: doing paperwork, learning about the institution, and information by audience, with residents, businesses and organisations front and centre. We validated the content tree and content plan, with the template for each page, with the Council's team in working sessions and on clickable prototypes.

On that structure we designed the pieces that matter most day to day. My folder stops being split by profile and becomes a single place to check applications and case files. The procedure finder filters by topic, profile and type, and shows featured procedures before the full catalogue. And the procedure page brings together, on a single page, all the information and the way to start it, in a format also designed to be printed, as the Council's in-person service required. All of it in desktop and mobile wireframes, two visual proposals, and the final design of every template in Figma: the corporate blue, Nunito typeface, a supporting palette with the contrast accessibility requires, and its own iconography.

And we wrote, in Catalan and Spanish, the 11 new pages the regulations require: the procedure guide, the register of authorised officials, electronic seal verification, the interoperable data catalogue, communications on accessibility requirements, and information for each audience. We worked from laws 39/2015 and 40/2015 and Royal Decree 203/2021, and wrote them in plain language: what it is, who can do it, how it's done and where to ask for help.