David Leigh

It’s not until you try and use a website that its sheer user-unfriendlyness can come to light. One of the big examples is the website of RENFE, the Spanish railway company, which although it looks good and is translated into a handful of languages, completely fails as a useful tool.

My girlfriend and I are planning to go to Valls on Sunday to attend the annual calçotada festival, and since it will involve two of my favourite pastimes - eating and drinking - we thought we would be better off if we took public transport rather than drive. The problem is that the website has never been designed with the idea of getting information out in a way that actually anybody to anyone. In fact it is a simple question of marketing; what does the train using population want when they use the website?

A simple question, but one that has been messed up badly. The site is subdivided into different areas of operation which are imposible to understand - why would I know whether I want one service or another?

The practical upshot of this is that the site may tell you that journey from A to B is impossible, simply because you’re in the wrong area of the site. If you go into another section you’ll find it is possible - I first noticed this when finding the timetable for a journey I have travelled before, only for the website to come up with a blank.

Why was it so difficult to design the RENFE website to be actually useful? Did anyone ever site down and think how customers were likely to request info? And why bother translating it when a tourist is even less likely to know which train service they need for any given journey.

It takes a special talent to do this.

I was in the centre of Barcelona yesterday morning for a meeting, but beforehand I needed to go to Fnac to exchange a CD that I’d given for Christmas. After Fnac I walked accross Plaça Catalunya and was a little surprised to see a large, much-tattooed man wearing nothing but skin tight briefs.

Aha, I thought, some kind of advertising stunt.

It took a moment longer to register that his skin tight briefs were in fact a tattoo and so he was stark naked in the middle of Barcelona and on very public display - from this I decided he was either mad or bad, and very probably dangerous to know. 

A very curious thought went through my head at this point - that if I am ever attacked by a madman I don’t want him to be a naked madman.

Anyway, he didn’t, but I thought I’d find a nice friendly policeman/woman while walking to my appointment and tell them that there was a mad/bad naked man in Plaça Catalunya. Of course Barcelona being Barcelona there were no police in sight.

Can you imagine the same situation in Trafalgar Square?

Last night saw the first round of the Barcelona derby with Espanyol playing host to FC Barcelona at their home stadium on Montjuic. In fact the I can see the stadium from the front terrace and if I stretch a bit the other way I can also see Camp Nou - or as most Anglophones insist, the Nou Camp.

But what a terrible performance put on by Barcelona - the score was 3-1 to Espanyol, but could easily have been 5-1. They just didn’t get it together as a team and Ronaldinho was completely missing the spark that makes him Ronaldinho. I can’t wait for Messi to return to fitness and see if the team returns to form in the second half of the season.

Even the normally calm Frank Rijkaard managed to lose his cool at one point, slamming his fist into the perspex side of the dugout, knocking out a broken section and thereby drawing the close attention of two members of Espanyol’s ground staff.

BTW, you can buy FC Barcelona tickets online and save yourself the hassle of getting them when you’re in Barcelona.