Competitive Analysis — Your Ultimate Guide

Getting to grips with the ins and outs of a UX competitor analysis can help you know your market, product and goals better. You will also understand the competition, get actionable insights and boost your brand. With an almost limitless number of competitors out there all vying for attention, the heat is on to understand exactly what you are doing right (or wrong) to create an effortless user experience and a product that people enjoy using.

What is a competitive analysis?

A competitive market analysis, also known as “competitor research,” is the process of comparing the different strategies of your competitors to find strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Competitive research also analyzes current and future trends, potential obstacles, how to overcome these potential obstacles, and any consumer pain points that may exist.

Why Should You Perform a UX Competitive Analysis?

Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of your competitors’ UX can help you design a superior user experience that outperforms others on the market, builds brand loyalty, and boosts conversions.

Here are a few of the specific benefits of analyzing the UX of your competitors.

Find Market Gaps

During your analysis, you may discover a need for features your competitors’ websites don’t include. Understanding these market gaps might help you identify features you could build into your own UX design.

For example, you may discover that not all types of users you want to target are being served well with your available features, such as filtering options, checkout flow, or accessibility.

Understand the Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Competition

When you look at the user experience provided by your direct competitors, it gives you insights into their design features, user journeys, and the feelings evoked by their UX designs.

Are there competitors that offer a particularly good user experience example? If so, why? It could be that your competitor has figured out an innovative way to solve a problem, or they’ve implemented a new feature that provides a more intuitive or delightful experience.

You will also discover the weak spots in your competitors’ UX designs. If there are sites in your market that offer a poor user experience, figuring out why can help you understand what not to do with your own website.

Identify the Advantages and Disadvantages of Your UX Design

As you evaluate competing websites against your own, you will discover the advantages and disadvantages of your design choices.

Understanding what you’re doing well — and what you’re not doing well — compared to your competition can help you build an action plan for improving your UX.

Collect Evidence to Back Up Design Changes

The data you collect from your UX competitive analysis gives you clear evidence for your design decisions. Instead of taking chances when you make changes, you can move forward with an evidence-based approach and present to stakeholders with confidence.

Insight to Solve Usability Issues

If you’ve been struggling with UX issues and are unsure how to solve them, analyzing your competitors can give you new ideas for solving the problems and providing a better experience for your customers.

Types of Competitors to Audit for UX

Competition falls into two categories:

1. Direct competitors
2. Indirect competitors

Understanding direct competitors can help improve your product and pricing to make your brand more desirable, while indirect competition could expose new opportunities.

Who are Direct competitors?

Direct competitors offer the same goods and services to the same or overlapping target market. These competitors generally compete on price because their offerings are so similar.

Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are direct competitors offering similar products to a similar target market.

Who are Indirect competitors?

Indirect competitors operate in the same market space but offer different products. While these are different products, they usually fulfill the same need, so the customer chooses one over another.

Instagram and LinkedIn are indirect competitors. While these platforms fulfill different needs, they both compete for user attention.

For example, many couples go out for dinner and a movie. A cinema with a restaurant in the foyer competes with other local cinemas (direct competitors) and restaurants (indirect competitors).

In tech, we often see indirect competitors with product overlaps. For example, Twitter and YouTube are indirect competitors, but the former offers video hosting for Tweets to keep users on the platform.

Before Twitter offered video hosting, users had to upload video content to their YouTube account and share the link in a Tweet. Nowadays, Twitter users don’t need a YouTube account to share video content, and you can embed Tweet videos in blog posts, resulting in less traffic for YouTube.

6 UX Competitive Analysis Research Methods

Here are six methods for analyzing the competition.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is an analysis technique companies can use internally or against the competition. Companies can conduct a SWOT analysis on an entire industry, market, competitor, product range, or a single product.

A SWOT assesses four key areas:

• Strengths: Where is a competitor strongest? Areas where the competition makes it most difficult to compete.
• Weaknesses: Where is your competition weakest? What don’t they offer or do poorly? Pro tip: You can usually find this answer in your competitor’s 1-star reviews.
• Opportunities: What opportunities are open to your competition that they’re currently not exploiting? This opportunity could be a simple feature like one-click checkouts for an eCommerce brand to increase conversions.
• Threats: What could potentially harm your competitor’s business? These threats are usually external, like competition, legislation, politics, technology, etc.

This article from Investopedia provides a step-by-step guide to conducting a SWOT analysis.

Using a Competitor’s Product

One of the easiest ways to “spy” on your competition and gather data is using their products. For example:

• Firstly, what are your competitor’s touchpoints? What happens when you land on their website, download the app, read a blog article, etc.? How does the competition turn traffic into users and then paying customers?
• How does your competitor present its products and pricing to customers?
• What happens when you sign up for a free trial?
• How easy is it to upgrade? And more importantly, do they make it easy to cancel–what’s that process like?
• Analyze the overall UI design, including layout, microinteractions, colors, typography, etc.
• Use the product as a customer to complete tasks. Were there any pain points? What does your competitor do well and poorly?

Treat yourself as a usability participant by using an empathy map to record your feelings and emotions using your competitor’s product. Maybe you were confused and frustrated by an unclear pricing structure, or the intuitive UI and microinteractions made it fun to use the product.

Reading Competitors’ Reviews

Reviews from mobile app stores, social media (Facebook pages, Twitter mentions), marketplaces, and websites like TrustPilot are excellent resources for analyzing competitors (and also your product’s UX). These customer reviews allow you to find out what customers love and hate about your competition.

Spend time analyzing reviews to find positive and negative patterns, and compare these patterns with your other research. Customers often leave comments like, “I wish the product could…” These types of reviews allow designers to identify gaps that competitors aren’t filling.

Comparison Chart

Comparison charts are best for direct competitors that offer similar product features. For example, you might want to compare a paid plan to your competitors to determine which company offers customers the most value.

This article from EdrawMax provides a breakdown of the five kinds of comparison charts and how to conduct one.

User Journey Comparison

User journeys map how customers complete tasks from start to end. Optimizing this end-to-end process can enhance the user experience and increase conversions.

Comparing your user journeys to successful competitors could uncover the keys to their secret to their success. For example, you might discover your competitors use fewer steps or strategic CTA placement to convert more customers.

Usability Test on a Competitor’s Prototype

One way to compare the competition is by building a prototype replica of their product or flow to see how users interact and engage with it. Designers can use these insights to revise their designs and make improvements.

How to conduct a competitive analysis in user vs market research

Typically, the user research team will conduct a UX competitive analysis to inform other teams like design, product, and engineering about what actions they need to take next.

👇Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to conducting a UX competitive analysis for UX research.

1. Identify your goals and define your product.

What are you trying to accomplish with your product? What kind of user journey do you want to create? What are the exact features that your product needs in order to satisfy your users?

These are the questions that you should ask before creating a new product. This step usually kicks off the discovery phase of the product development cycle. You want to understand your users, their problems, and opportunities before you go and build that product.

2. Compile a list of your direct and indirect competitors.

Who else is competing with you? Do they have the same user base as you, or do they share the same goals as you?

There are two types of competitors, direct and indirect. Direct competitors are ones that offer the same product or service as you.

Indirect competitors are ones that offer something different, but they could potentially satisfy the same user needs and reach the same goal.

Compile a list of both types of competitors and prioritize the ones that have the most similarities with you.

3. Choose a competitive analysis method.

There are various ways to gather information about your competitors. Some methods might take more time than others, and they all vary in complexity.

Our suggestion is to do a combination of a few UX competitive analysis methods to gather the most relevant information for your needs.

Here are some examples of UX competitive analysis methods:

• SWOT analysis: Identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Using a competitor’s product: Get to know their product as if you were their target user and see how their product compares to yours.
• Reading a competitor’s reviews: Want to know how their users really feel about their product? Read through real feedback from real users. A great place to start is G2 reviews.
• Comparison chart of the competitors’ product features: Map out the different functionalities, features, and services that come with their product. A great example of this is our Tools Map, a report on the current tools available in the UX landscape.
• User journey comparison: Take some time to identify gaps or opportunities within your own user journey by comparing it to your competitor’s. A great way to visualize your users’ perception of your product compared to your competitors is a perceptual map.
• Usability test on competitor’s prototype: Usability testing is key to knowing how effective your product is. Simulate your competitors’ user experience or product and run some tests on it to measure its performance.

4. Present your findings and identify action items.

Once you’ve gathered all your data, it’s important to share these insights and create an actionable strategy from what you’ve learned.

Potential action items include:

• Giving direction to your design team about what design aspects could be improved
• Providing insight for the engineering team about what front-end or back-end infrastructure needs improvement
• Informing the product team with new insights about the product’s features and performance

A competitive market analysis will focus more on the strategy of bringing a product to the market. Although a market analysis is not as focused on the UX side of things, this type of competitive analysis provides deeper insight into business-related factors that can help supplement your user insights.

👇Here’s a simplified view of what a competitive market analysis looks like.

1. Identify your marketing channels, strategies, and activities.
2. Identify your goals and objectives.
3. Gather data.
4. Make a comparison.
5. Identify issues and gaps.
6. Create an action plan.
7. Repeat.

In conclusion

In a world where restless creative minds invent something new all the time, it’s crucial to study the competitive landscape before starting to work on a product’s design. The thoughtful UX competitive analysis can give you valuable insights that will nudge you to implement successful design solutions. Be aware of pitfalls to make the best of your UX competitive research. And if you need any help with it — drop us a line.

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