Emotion, design, and strategy: 3 lenses for doing a competitive analysis
With so many companies out there vying for attention, it’s important to know how your product fares against the competition. One way to do this is to do a competitive analysis.
A competitive analysis is a method for looking at a competitor’s offerings to see what is working for them and what your company might be doing right (or wrong).
Working as a design researcher, I’ve done a fair share of competitive analyses. Drawing from experience and watching others, I’ve picked up some tips you can use to get an overview of the competition and deliver actionable insights that can inform product design and strategy. It involves trusting your instincts, understanding user experience (UX) heuristics, and embracing a business mindset.
1. Trust your gut
Have you ever opened a website that made you go “Eek!” or “Wow!”, but found it hard to explain? But, somehow you knew instantly something was unpleasant or delightful. Don’t ignore these hunches or gut feelings, instead use them as a catalyst for your investigation.
It’s OK to talk about how a product makes you feel. — Jay C.
Designers and product teams spend so much effort crafting experiences that touch our emotions, to ignore your feelings would be dishonest. As Jay, my design lead, told me: “it’s OK to talk about how a product makes you feel”. Maybe you didn’t vibe with choice of color, font, or images. How did it feel? What was the voice and tone like? How long did it take to go from point A to B? These hunches are important to capture because they speak to first impressions about the user experience. Your gut reactions are valid and have a place in your audit.
2. Connect UX principles
Hunches are great, but they can’t stand alone; tying your hunches to a heuristic standard can help you to make stronger arguments. Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman proposed the 10 Heuristics for User Interface, which are a set of principles used to help critique user interfaces. They are:
- Visibility of system status
- Match between system and the real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency and standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
- Help and documentation
These have been touted as the standard, however there are other frameworks you can use to fit your needs. For example, at IBM, we use a set of heuristic principles based on the aforementioned principles to understand the experience journey of our customers. We look at things like:
How does a user learn about the product?
How can a user explore the product?
How does a user get working fast?
How does a user get unstuck?
Using UX principles as a lens helps you articulate the observances and violations of an user interface. It’s best to become familiar with different kinds of UX principles so that you can speak confidently about your observations.
3. Get down to business
In my experience, UX designers and researchers, naturally, tend to focus heavily on UX and less on business performance. This is where we fall short. I believe incorporating a business perspective will strengthen your analysis.
I sat down with Josh Mason, the Competitive Intelligence (CI) Lead at IBM, for some advice on doing this. Different than user research, CI involves gathering and analyzing information about competitors with the goal of making better decisions; it’s about turning information into action, gathering information to provide a link between that info and the business, allowing you to make decisions about business strategy. For design, it helps create a starting point, a benchmark for expectations.
Josh mentions some quick and dirty ways design researchers can add a business perspective. Here are a few tips he proposed and how to use them.
Listen to what these companies are telling you through the things they put on their website. — Josh M.
Try the product demonstration and watch the video. One starting point is looking at a competitor’s demo. If there is a free trial of a product, sign-up and take it for a spin. Some companies even let you try a full version of the product for a short period of time. Also, they usually have a video describing their product. This is a good way to see what it does, and get a sense of the value proposition and the target audience.
Read their blogs, white papers, and news. Besides demos, Josh suggests looking at some of the tech literature (e.g. tech articles, white papers, and blog posts) to see what things are being highlighted (e.g. strategy, product features, profits, etc.). In one recent audit I did, I found a competitor’s blog to be a helpful source for learning about their strategy as well as their voice and tone.
Talk to people. Tap into the knowledge of the people around you (e.g. developers, marketing, product managers, etc.). For example, if a company makes a technical claim about a product, ask a developer to talk about the implications of those claims (e.g. Are these possible or not?). Talk to product managers about differentiation and market position. Not only does this give you multiple perspectives about the product in relation to the competition, it also it allows you to build relationships with other members outside of your core design team.
Go up to your product manager and ask them: does this make sense and how does it relate to us? — Josh M.
Look for user reviews. Nothing speaks to the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of a product than user reviews. G2.crowd.com is a great source for finding reviews on business software and services. Skim the reviews for pull-quotes and take note of tone and language. Also, capture the rating and number of reviews. For example one of our products had a fairly good rating but it only had 15 reviews, while our competitor had a 4-star rating with over 200 reviews. This information gave us perspective on the rating of our product. While we had decent reviews and ratings, it was from a small sample size vastly less than our competitors. Our competitors were clearly doing something right.
Look at social media (I added this one). Design researchers should consider how competitors build and nurture community. One way to do this is through social listening. In other words, what are companies doing on social media and how are they engaging their followers? For example, check Twitter to see a company’s personality (voice and tone), their followers and contributors, and the things they are talking about.
Here are some questions to ask yourself when looking at social media presence:
How frequent are they posting content (tweeting, posting)?
What content are they posting (e.g. gifs, cartoon strips, etc.) and what is the content about (product info, events, etc.)?
Who are their followers?
Who are their contributors?
What’s the voice and tone?
How often do they respond to followers?
Looking at the social media presence of the competition tunes your ear to social listening and could lead to coming up with creative yet authentic ways to build and maintain community around a product.
Conclusion
I love doing competitive analyses because it’s like being a detective, looking for clues and meanings hidden in plain sight. What I have come to learn is that doing the analysis is one part, explaining your rationale and translating them into design and business insights are another.
So, let your hunches guide you. Use UX and business lenses to inform your observations, and tap into people around you. As a result, you will be able to speak confidently about inspiration, caution, and opportunity to your team and other stakeholders in a way that will stick.
I’d like to thank Sasha Kerbel, Josh Mason, Rachel Miles, Dave Huber, John Murray, Jay Cagle, Michael Stokes, Lauren Goldstein, and Amanda Booth for helping to make this possible :)
Roosevelt T. Faulkner is a Design Research Intern at IBM based in Austin, Texas. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
