If you were a boxer or a cage fighter, you’d be crazy to get into the ring without doing some research on your opponent. The same goes for football coaches, Olympic athletes, chess players, basketball teams, and any other competitive sports teams and players.
And businesses.
If you’re starting a business or are an existing business competing for customers with other organisations, ignoring what your competitors are doing would be irresponsible. Understanding your rivals and how their value compares to yours—especially in the eyes of your users or customers—is a task best carried out using competitive analysis.
Understanding Competitive Analysis
What Is Competitive Analysis, and Why Is It So Important?
Okay, so what exactly is competitive analysis? Let’s imagine you run a Formula 1 team. Competitive analysis is sending out spies to the pit lane to see how other teams operate: the upgrades they bring to their cars, the tech innovations that buy them those valuable extra tenths of a second that can win or lose a championship, how they look after and listen to their drivers, mechanics and engineers, and how they sell themselves to their fans.
In the same way, performing a UX competitive analysis for your business requires you to send out your spies to see how your competitors’ websites, apps, customer flows, journeys, and operations compare to yours. Then, with all that new data, you can use the information to give you an edge and boost your own operations.
The Key Benefits of UX Competitive Analysis
- To identify and understand your competitors.
- To gather valuable insights that help you improve product design and user satisfaction.
- To spot gaps in your operation and recognise new or missed market opportunities.
- To discover and implement new features your competitors haven’t thought of.
- To spot pain points in processes and flows.
- To improve existing features.
- To make your products more accessible and enjoyable.
- To boost UX, UI, information architecture, and product presentation.
- To monitor for positive trends and disruptions and stay ahead of the curve.
- To provide a benchmark of your industry success.
Ultimately, these elements help organisations make better, data-driven, evidence-based design decisions and informed choices that improve operations and returns—knowledge is power, as they say. How we gather that knowledge and use it is where having a structured and detailed UX competitive analysis process is crucial.
Introducing SWOT analysis
SWOT analysis is a great way to remind ourselves why we’re conducting UX research, especially given what we can learn from competitive analysis.
SWOT stands for:
- Strengths – What a business does well—typically, internal factors.
- Weaknesses – What a business does badly—also internal.
- Opportunities – Areas for growth and beneficial improvement—typically external factors.
- Threats – Factors that could harm a business or its product—again, external.
Identifying these elements in your competitors and your organisation highlights where you’re doing well and where you’re falling behind. It’s also an opportunity to try and future-proof your operations, identify gaps in your system or market, and then fix or fill them.
When Should You Conduct Competitive Analysis?
- When delivering new products.
- When exploring new markets.
- To improve performance.
- To enhance existing features.
- As part of a UX audit.
- Simplifying processes, customer journeys, and flows.
- Carrying out ongoing monitoring for industry trends.
Organisations usually conduct competitive analysis when introducing a new product or feature, but ultimately, as with all good UX practices, it should be an iterative process.
Let’s go back to our Formula 1 analogy: Each team has an abundance of engineers and tacticians exploring myriad ways to improve performance that gives them a competitive advantage, whether during a pitstop, race strategy, engine efficiency, aerodynamics, and more. Their work never stops, as they regularly introduce upgrades. The same should go for competitive analysis. Your competitors are working as hard as you to gain an edge in your market, so monitoring them and their products should be part of your ongoing UX strategy.
How to Conduct Competitive Analysis
As much as we’d love a magic button we could click that delivers all the relative information into our laps, conducting a thorough competitive analysis takes work. The tools we use to test our own practices and monitor performance (think analytics packages and some of the more probing usability testing tools such as heat mapping) aren’t available for us to use on our competitors (yet!).
Instead, we need to scrutinise our competitors using the available market research methods and tools: reading reviews, monitoring their progress and pitfalls, and then, by using readily available UX research methods, conducting surveys, interviews, questionnaires, and usability testing (with target users) into our leading and comparative competitor products to make the real comparisons we can use to better our products.
Know Why You’re Conducting Competitor Analysis
It sounds ideal to have an open-ended project that delivers the hidden factors you didn’t know were affecting your operation. As we’ve regularly stated, without reason or defining goals, you’re conducting research for research’s sake. It rarely achieves what you need from such an investment.
Asking yourself why you want to explore your competitors’ behaviours, pitfalls or successes and what you hope to gain from them, whether to improve specific features, areas of operation, or something else entirely, should drive how you’ll achieve those goals.
Define Your Goals
This is a direct extension of the ‘why’ of competitive analysis into the ‘how’. Defining your goals will help you put together the best research plan to uncover the answers you need to achieve them.
And remember, as far as those essential goals go, the SMART system is a great ally: make sure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Identifying Competitors
So, who are these competitors that will help you better understand your business products?
Direct competitors: Businesses offering the same product in the same market space—those you’re going head-to-head with for sales and market share.
Indirect competitors: Businesses offering different products to the same customer or offering the same product to a different customer. For example, luxury brands that sell different items, or a business that sells the same item as you but to a different market.
Aspirational competitors: The leading competitors in any industry that you admire and aspire to appear or operate like.
Disruptive competitors: With so much new and emerging tech, disruption is prevalent in any industry. These competitors (possibly exciting new startups or market leaders with resources to invest) are the most likely to introduce innovative solutions that can turn an established process or industry on its head.
Collecting Data
While there are plenty of tools to help gather data, much of your UX competitive analysis will require you to explore and engage in your competitors’ websites, apps, services, and marketing to learn about their operations.
Reviews and customer feedback are key to the process; digging into review sites, app reviews (available on all mobile app stores), social media, and any other points of customer contact should be high on your list. There’s a lot to learn from listening to how your direct and indirect competitors operate and interact with their customers, so direct user feedback from your target audience is—as always in UX design and research—essential.
Analyzing Competitor UX
- Assess user interface design and usability.
- Evaluate the overall user journey and key interactions.
- Compare features and functionalities.
Again, while specialist tools exist to compile and analyse your findings, spreadsheets can work equally well if you follow your usual UX research practices. Remember, you’re looking for those items we discussed in our SWOT analysis section: strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Add the items you find to your results and look for key areas you can utilise to refine your product and operations.
Tools for Competitive Analysis
Research Tools
- Gather data wherever you can: using specific tools or via industry reports, social media, review sites, app stores, and everywhere and anywhere else.
- Usability-test your competitors’ products, websites, apps, and marketing.
Competitor research begins by exploring what it’s like to be one of their customers, so sign up for their products and put yourself in their shoes. You’ll learn just how different their process is from yours, how they market, their onboarding process, their introductions and support, how they make sales, and, in turn, what they do better and worse than you and what you need to change.
And when you’re done personally testing their entire user journey, bring your ideal customer personas in to test them, too.
UX Evaluation Tools
- Customer journey mapping
- Traditional user research options, such as surveys, questionnaires, and interviews
- Usability testing
- Market research and customer review analysis
Specialist tech tools are available to help you gather and compare data between your and your competitors’ products, but when it comes to UX research, we can use an array of traditional methods to hunt out the information we’re looking for and compile it in something as straightforward as a spreadsheet.
Presenting Your Findings
As with any UX research report, it must be easy to digest and get right to the important points.
With that in mind, you need to list the original objectives, the study’s key metrics, what the data uncovered, actionable insights, and the recommendations your UX designers can implement to meet those predefined goals.
Your report should be the start of a benchmarking process and your starting point for an ongoing competitive analysis practice. Remember, UX is iterative, so continual assessment, monitoring, and adjustments are required to keep your products up-to-date, fresh, and competitive.
Finally, it’s crucial to continue monitoring the competitive landscape of both direct and indirect competitors. You can’t be sure when the next disruption or big breakthrough will happen, so keeping up with industry trends is essential.
Summary
UX Competitor analysis should be an ongoing part of your process. There’s a lot to learn from how users interact with your direct competitors (and aspirational, disruptive, and indirect competitors, for that matter). Identify market gaps, and you can introduce new features that push you ahead of the competition. Whether that’s streamlining user journeys for your target audience or giving them user interfaces that offer a superior user experience, competitor analysis can boost your brand’s UX design and delivery.
Our user research experts are available to help you get closer to your customers. If you would like to arrange a no obligation call, get in touch by emailing us at hello@ux247.com or share your requirement using the form below.
