Competitive Experience Analysis

An analysis of competitor’s products by looking at their experiences. Focus on the quality of the experience through measuring appropriate attributes that help quantifiably rate the competitors against your own product. This is not a feature or functionality comparison. It is important to look at attributes such as usability, efficiency, desirability and other UX heuristics.

When to Use

1. To ground the product team into understanding the problem space through leveraging competitor examples.
2. To validate or invalidate the potential goal of the project’s problem statement.
3. To compare your experience and problem solutions to comparable solutions.

Steps

1. Create a list of all possible competitors and categorize them by direct competitors, indirect competitors, and other specific product aspects.
2. Focus your analysis around the top competitors in each category. You do not want too many competitors or it’ll be too time consuming and difficult to summarize.
3. Walkthrough each product’s experience while taking screenshots of every screen and state.
4. Determine the specific attributes that are appropriate for your problem space and identify experience aspects that represent those attributes. Leverage what you’ve seen from the products to determine those appropriate aspects.
5. Create a rating system for each aspect under each attribute and rate each product.
6. Rate each product and visualize the competitors on a scale to represent which product is better at the specific attribute.
7. Complete the analysis by summarizing highlights from each product.

Components

1. App Highlights
2. Attributes Matrix – a basic table that rate all the aspects for all the attributes you’ve identified.
3. Attribute Scale Comparison – a subjective rating scale to compare a key experience attribute of competitors
   1. Summary of what the best experience would be and how the host app compares.
4. Customer Feedback Analysis - try to understand how their users feel about the product.
5. Screenshots of product/feature that is being compared
6. Other Matrixes - identify different design approaches your competitors take to solve similar problems.

Potential Attributes

• See Heuristics from Heuristic Evaluation
• See Product Experience Attributes
• Others:
  • Market Perception Subjective Rating: Product (App) Ratings, Reviews (Customer Voice Statements)
  • Visual appeal: warm –to- sterile; lively –to- dull; colorful –to- bland
  • Tone of Voice [Scale: friendly, playful, business-like]
  • Audience Targeting
  • Navigational models: pogo versus linear
  • Interaction Matrix: gestures (ex. Tap-and-hold), navigation patterns (ex. Tabs)
  • Personalization [Scale: one size fits all - to - highly personalized]

Next Steps

• Can use a Heuristic Evaluation or Expert Review to rate competitors.
• Can lead into competitive research
• Can feed into empathy map (or replaces) that feeds into journey map.

References

1. http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/04/differentiating-your-design-a-visual-approach-to-competitive-reviews.php
2. http://www.axure.com/c/blog/177-five-ways-ux-firm-digital-telepathy-designs-through-conversation.html

Templates

1. Competitive Experience Analysis Prep Template

Created by: Joe Steinkamp | Last updated by: Joe Steinkamp