Emergency car shopping is no fun. This past month was the second time I had to shop for a car in a short timeframe without advance warning. Like most informed shoppers, I went online to get a feel for my options, armed with knowledge of what I was looking for: apart from safety, gas mileage and reliability, it had to comfortably seat six and not require me to take out a second mortgage.

I felt like a persona out of a scenario that I had role-played a few years ago when our UX team at Capgemini conducted a global UX benchmarking project for General Motors. That year, a JD Power consumer satisfaction study revealed that 68% of GM’s US websites were below the industry average, with two in the bottom 10%. Heuristic evaluations were one method we used to identify the causes of dissatisfaction while evaluating over 50 of GM’s B2C websites, along with 75 competitor websites, across various countries and brands.