Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 6]

Competitor evaluation is often a forgotten & underwhelming step in the UX Process. However, here are some reasons why we should really give it some love:

To be aware of what our competitors are doing and how they are doing it
To be ahead of what is going on in our industry
To understand where our product sits in relation to others
And, last but not least, to be aware of default patterns and interactions that will be expected by our users

Part of our job as UXers is to innovate, but another big part of our jobs is also to “not reinvet the wheel”. If a specific pattern is working well and being highly used by our crew (aka: users ❤) there is no reason to change it completely. It’s about learning our users mental models and not adding to their cognitive load while using our product.

So what is important when running a UX driven competititve evaluation?

Surprisingly, the first important step is to know our own product from end to end — which we are expected to do anyway 😉 and start by running a “self-analysis” to understand which criteria we need to compare and benchmark with our competitors. So let’s start with a heuristic self-evaluation.

A heuristic evaluation usually involves reviewing a site’s interface, comparing it against accepted usability principles. The criterias can be defined by us based on our project needs, but overall, the LEMErS framework can be quite helpful as a starting point, as it covers

Learnability
Efficiency
Memorability
ErrorManagement
Satisfaction

Another useful criteria could be:

Copy and tone of voice
Interactions
Steps in the journey
“Post-purchase” experience

We then define the evaluation criteria that best suits our project, list them out, and analyse where our product sits in each specific criteria. After running our own evaluation, we do the same with at least 3 of our main competitors. That first draft could look a bit like this image on the left!

The best part is just about to start! After finishing analysing every criteria for each competitor, we organize this data in a “competitive analysis table” that should give us a clear picture of where our product stands and what needs to be improved.

Here is an example of how it could look like:

Competitive Evaluation Template

On the example above we can observe that our “self evaluation” is performing quite well comparing to the competitors, however, is the only product that doesn’t meet “criteria 2”. We can also see that any of the products meet “criteria 7”, which could become our diferential. So these are some of the next steps our team could be taking based on the competitive evaluation.

I would also highly suggest being a regular user of competitor products through out your product cycle, this way you can see what they are testing with A/B tests and see any incremental changes they make.

Your competitive analysis can go further than our direct competitors though.

It’s important to understand what is our user’s consideration set as well:

Let’s take as example a “problem space” where a user needs to send a mail from one point to another.

Technically, what are their options to solve this problem?

Walk, drive, or cycle to the destination carrying the item
Send it by post
… Ask a friend to do the job?
or, maybe, transferring some money so the destinatary can actually purchase the item?

Whatever is the chosen format, above you can see some aspects of our user’s consideration set.

What really matters here is: our competitor is not only the business that offers exactly the same service/product as us, but every single aspect that could get on our user’s way to engage with our product.

And that’s where the magic happens.

By identifying your user’s consideration set, we can start to go blue sky and to think about other ways to address their needs. Maybe it will be another feature in our products or another service we will offer, but as long as we are supporting our user to achieve their goals, we are achieveing ours too 🙂

Don’t forget

To share the findings with your team & to share your competitive analysis and tag #30dayUXchallenge so we can keep the movement alive ❤

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Gabi Braga — UX Designer at Envato Elements, freelancer at Toptal & beer enthusiast in her spare time

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Competitor evaluation & Consideration set was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Competitor evaluation & Consideration set

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