Competitive Matrix

One of our assignments this week was to put together a competitive matrix to help us identify gaps that would end up being differentiators or market opportunities. I identified three gaps:

1. Diverse Opinions: WATT should have an intentionally diverse set of opinions. This does not mean just center-left and center-right. Diverse means diverse. WATT is also not pulling punches in its bias — it should represent views of the far-left and far-right and everything in between.
2. Conciseness: WATT should be useful in less than 1 minute. I should be able to come in, read the headline titled “The <ideology> perspective” and learn something worthwhile. Anything beyond that is gravy IMO. It sort of reminds me of Wikipedia cards in google search results (or whatever entity store Alexa uses).
3. Exposure in context: It should be easier to learn more the deeper I go. That may seem obvious, but it’s not straightforward to show a set of diverse ideologies without overwhelming the user. I should be able to bring in more context when I want it. The better I can do this, the more useful of a tool WATT can be.

Ease of gaining insight

I have a fourth column that looks like a gap — Ease of gaining insight. To me this is sort of the sum of the first three gaps. My goal with all of this is to make it easy to learn about ideologies I don’t already understand (usually my own and maybe one other). It makes sense that this would come up as a gap, it’s pretty much what I’ve had in my head the whole time.