Your Web Site - Usable or Snooze-able?

By Gabrielle Mosquera

Logical question: How do I know if my customers can properly navigate my Web site as it stands?

Logical answer: Ask them!

No doubt you've heard a similar pitch in conference sessions. But in his recent sessions at The DMA's net.marketing and Annual Catalog Conference shows, Phil Terry, CEO of e-consultancy Creative Good, took this advice one step further by including parts of his company's Customer Experience Methodology (CEM). According to Terry, CEM is less task-focused than many existing user experience research methods, and relies heavily on observations culled from what he terms "listening labs." The following notes summarize each of CEM's five phases, and highlight some principles that marketers may want to remember.