Understanding the competitors

During the stakeholder and user interviews, they might mention a few competitors. The stakeholders probably will tell you the ones they consider as competitors from a business point of view. The users might mention the same competitors and likely other ones that they consider deliver the same or similar solutions. It is a good moment to also understand how they use the competitor and why they consider it as a substitute solution, what is best and worse if compared to your product or service. The users might mention competitors that the stakeholders didn't know exist or even don't consider as a competitor. During research you might find other ones too. It is important to analyze all of them.

Analyzing the competitors, especially those mentioned by the users, will help you to understand what they are used to. To start your Comparative Competitive Analysis (CCA), you can first organize the competitors into two groups:

• Direct competitors: Which usually have the same core functions and similar user base
• Indirect competitors: Which might offer different functions, but might solve the same user' needs

The UX specialist, Jamie Levy, author of the book UX Strategy, has shared a template to do competitive analysis in a more business perspective. The idea is to analyze direct and indirect competitors according to these aspects:

• URL of website or app store location
• Usernames and password access
• Purpose of site
• Year founded
• Funding rounds
• Revenue streams
• Monthly traffic or app downloads
• Number of SKUs/listings (estimate)
• Primary categories
• Social networks
• Content types
• Personalization features
• Community/UGC features
• Competitive advantage
• Heuristic evaluation
• Customer reviews
• General notes
• Questions/notes to team
• Analysis

When you have the competitors listed, you can also use heuristics analysis or simply compare their weaknesses and strengths. One way to do this is adding notes on screenshots: red for weaknesses, and green for strengths, for example. You can also organize weaknesses and strengths in groups such as flow, design, communication, and so on:

You can also create a spreadsheet to analyze the competitors about navigation and content, for example:

You can also create more visual charts to analyze specific features or functionalities, as you can see in the following figure:

London-based interaction designer, Nacho, used the competitors' logos and organized them as direct and indirect, as you can see in the following chart:

Another very effective way to help you to find UX issues when you do competitive analysis is doing competitive comparative task analysis. In this case, you compare the same (or similar) tasks that the user would do on your website or app and on your competitors. When you compare the same tasks flows with different competitors you might find unnecessary steps, features and functionalities missing in the designed flow. You can use a wall with the printed screens from each step of the flow:

The best format to use on your CCA will depend on which UX issues you will need to identify. It is important to keep in mind that you don't need to only analyze your competitors, but also compare them, including the experience you are delivering to your user.