How does your product compare to your competitors’?
You want to make your product the best in the industry, and you’re not alone. Because your product, process, or service does not exist in a vacuum it is important to understand what your competitors offer. User Centric conducts user experience competitive analysis to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your product as compared to your competitors’. Effective product design needs to involve an understanding of context including the offerings, techniques, and standards of others in your market space. Your users have a choice. What can make your product stand out against the competition?
Competitive analysis accomplishes a number of goals
- Understand the marketplace: Who are your competitors? What are they offering? How can you maintain your competitive advantage?
- Build domain knowledge: What content and functionality do your competitors offer that you have not yet considered?
- Identify best practices: What customer needs and preferences are you competing to meet? Beyond functionality, how can you offer a better quality user experience?
- Fine-tune your strategic direction: What are the unique strengths of your product in the marketplace? Is there a strong synergy between the user’s experience and your branding?
Methods can include:
- One-to-one tasks on competing products in a usability test to gather a variety of qualitative and quantitative data for benchmarking.
- Eye tracking sessions to determine which site or product supports a more effective or efficient interaction.
- Expert evaluations comparing your product to your competitors’ using usability heuristics.
- User research methods such as contextual interviews to uncover how users interact with competing products in a natural setting.
Results can help you to:
- Gather ideas and leverage wisdom to continue where your competitors left off
- Discover strengths and weaknesses of a product or process
- Make difficult decisions about your strategic direction
Our experience with user experience competitive analyses:
User Centric has applied competitive analysis techniques to user experience research for a range of industries and products. Examples include comparative usability tests of medical injection devices, tests of digital TVs, cameras and MP3 players, and benchmark tests of mobile phone interfaces. We have also tested a range of Web sites against their competition in industries such as e-Commerce, travel Web sites, and pharmaceutical information sites.
Questions?
Interested in additional information about competitive analysis from User Centric? Contact us to schedule a conversation to discuss if competitive analysis will help answer your questions.
