Competitor Analysis
Overview
Competitive analysis is the process of evaluating your competitors' products, services, and user experiences to gain insights into their strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunity. By understanding how competitors perform, you can identify opportunities to differentiate your product, improve its design, and meet user needs more effectively.
Why conduct a competitive analysis?
Competitive analysis helps UX designers assess how competitors solve similar problems, the design trends they use, and what users like or dislike about their products. It also delivers insights into the features, functionalities, user flows, and emotional impacts created by your competitors' design solutions. By understanding these aspects of competitor products, you can craft your design to aim for a superior product and enhance user experience.
Identify opportunities: Spot gaps in competitors’ products where your solution can stand out.
Learn from competitors’ mistakes: See what users criticize about competitors and avoid similar pitfalls.
Stay informed on trends: Keep up with design trends and standards that users have become accustomed to.
Benchmark your product: Measure your product's strengths and weaknesses against those of your competitors.
Improve user experience: Gain insights on usability, accessibility, and overall design choices that may inform better decisions for your product.
It is an initial step in the UX design process and should be done before starting a new project.
Steps to conduct a Competitor Analysis:
Define your goals: Why are you conducting the analysis? Is it to improve your design, benchmark your product, or understand a specific feature better? What aspects of competitors’ products are you focusing on?
Identify competitors: Who is currently trying to solve this problem? Are they direct (companies offering similar products) or indirect (companies that solve a similar problem but with a different approach) competitors? Identify 3-5 competitors.
Define your comparison criteria: Break down your analysis into clear criteria to evaluate. Create a short list of comparison criteria. You can add more when needed.
Gather data: Examine competitors’ designs, product interfaces, and features to gather information.
How are the competitors trying to solve the problem?
What are their main differentiator or unique value-adds for their business and products?
What IA has been chosen? What kind of interactions help to drive the feature? What UI elements complement this goal?
Hands-On Testing
Use competitors’ products to go through user flows (e.g., creating an account, searching for products, or completing a checkout process).
Secondary Research
Collect reviews, case studies, or feedback about the competitor's product from sources like App Store reviews, Reddit, or social media.
Visual Capture
Take screenshots or record user journeys to visualize the competitors’ design decisions and flows.
Analyze design elements: Evaluate how the competitors’ design choices influence usability, functionality, and user satisfaction. Copy competitor designs into your analysis overview.
Document User Flows: Map out how tasks are completed within competitor apps to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Use FigJam to collect, organize, and present your findings. You can also present your findings using Google Slides.
Example 1: Competitive Analysis for a Fintech Dashboard
Scenario: A UX team is tasked with creating a new fintech dashboard that offers a more intuitive user experience than existing solutions.
Steps Taken:
Identified competitors: Mainstream financial apps like Mint, YNAB (You Need A Budget), and Quicken.
Reviewed user interfaces: Focused on the simplicity and effectiveness of their dashboard layouts and information architecture.
Collected user feedback: Analyzed customer reviews to determine common frustrations and desired features.
Example Overview of a Competitor Analysis:
Example 2: Competitive analysis of a dashboard interface
Let’s say you are tasked with designing a dashboard for a project management tool. You want to analyze competitors to understand how they design their dashboards to display project information effectively and identify areas for improvement.
Goal: Improve the usability and functionality of the dashboard interface to make project tracking, task management, and team collaboration easier for users.
Identify competitors: For this analysis we choose both direct and indirect competitors:
Direct competitors:
Asana: Known for its simple and visual project management dashboard.
Trello: Famous for its Kanban boards and task tracking.
Monday.com: Offers customizable dashboards with a focus on team collaboration.
Indirect Competitors:
Google Workspace (Sheets): Not specifically a project management tool, but used for task management.
ClickUp: Provides a wide variety of features, including customizable dashboards.
Define your Comparison Criteria:
Usability: Is the dashboard easy to navigate? How intuitive are the layout and visual elements?
Customization: Can users customize the layout, widgets, and features? Are there options to personalize the data view?
Visual Design: How clean and organized is the visual design? Are the data visualizations (charts, graphs, etc.) easy to understand?
Key Features: What key features are included (e.g., task tracking, project)
Analyze data:
Asana
Clear visual layout, good task tracking
Limited customization options for dashboard
Trello
Simple, Kanban-based organization
Lacks advanced features and data visualizations
Monday.com
Highly customizable, team collaboration
Overwhelming for new users due to feature overload
ClickUp
Rich features, real-time updates
Cluttered UI, can be confusing for users
Google Sheets
Simple, flexible for basic management
Not designed for task/project management
Document insights:
Opportunity to create a dashboard that balances customizability (like Monday.com) with simplicity (like Trello).
Focus on clear data visualization and intuitive task tracking, combining the strengths of Asana's simplicity with ClickUp's feature depth.
Simplify onboarding to avoid overwhelming new users, while still offering customization options for advanced users.
Further Resources:
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