Comparative Analysis

What

A comparative analysis involves assessing other companies' businesses, products, or services to see how they design for their users—in an effort to solve for potentially similar user needs. They can be direct competitor companies operating in the same sector, indirect competitor companies with only a few similarities, or unrelated companies that might be solving for a specific problem of interest. This method is often used to highlight strengths and weaknesses in order to make more informed decisions about your strategy going forward

Why

If you're new to an industry or client, a comparative analysis is good for giving you the market context that the company operates in. It can also highlight what users will expect if they’ve used similar products/services before.

If you’re working in-house you might be very clear on who the competitors and influencers are, and a proper comparative analysis allows you to build up a deeper body of research to be referred to in future projects.

How to do it

First you need to decide what it is you want to find out about your target companies. This is defined by the challenges you’re dealing with in the project and what you want to improve—you should have learned about these from interviews, user testing, or [insert research method].

Ex: Getting users to sign up.

Try to identify the top three to five competitors or related companies and figure out what it is that they are doing right, and what they could improve upon. How well is the service design or product integrated with its UX? Typically, the entire experience of a service provides an edge that goes way beyond how a product works.

Once identified, start organizing the list of competitors into a table with some at-a-glance info, a boilerplate might look something like this:

Competitor’s name
Competitor’s URL or download location
The number of users/downloads — mainly to identify the effectiveness of the platform
Number of years the platform or product has been in use (optional)
The main features being offered by competitors
Cost of service/product
Additional notes

Note: This isn't the actual analysis - just a way of organizing your targets

Once you've identified and organized your target companies—it's time to take a deep dive into each individual offering to start answering your questions. There are many different ways to analyze a product or service—but try to nail down the what and the how.

What are the “painkiller” solutions competitors are offering to end users? What is the precise nature of the problem they’re solving? What are the steps they follow to provide solutions? What are the devices/platforms through which they interact with end users? What are the specific features of a competitor’s product designed to solve the problem?

How does the competition sustain a competitive advantage over the other alternative solutions? How are they managing their platform infrastructure from a technical standpoint? How has the competition designed their product’s look and feel that contributes to its UX? How is the pricing structured?

Answering these two key areas will help you figure out where your product fits in the picture, what advantages and disadvantages you bring to the table, and how you can prioritize your strategy.

Tips and thought starters

If available, register for a free trial (or sign up for a brief period).
Use the competitor’s product and analyze how their user journeys/task flows are designed . Draw an approximate user journey map (for example, completing a purchase). How is the UX?
Examine how easy or frustrating it is to complete a task.
How well are they solving a problem? Could it be improved?
Interact with the competitor’s customer service — via email, Twitter, Facebook, phone calls, etc. and make note of how they handle such interactions.
How does the general discoverability of your competitor’s product/service rank? Their marketing and growth strategy? Analyze the competitor’s SEO, Alexa rankings, and social presence.
What is the competitor’s pricing strategy? Sometimes, even if your product’s features match the competitor’s, you can gain an edge by being smart about your pricing strategy.

When assessing how sites work you should screenshot or record your journeys, not forgetting to do it for both mobile and desktop, as they will be quite different. This way you have a record of what you’ve seen.

When you've gathered your raw materials, choose a document format you prefer for recording your findings: it’s probably going to be a text doc, spreadsheet, or presentation. Then create your report by going through each of your categories and write notes backed up with screenshot evidence of how others are solving that problem. Cover what approaches impressed you as a user most, and what approaches you think should be avoided.

Examples

ISL deliverables

Time Required

1-5 days

Pro-tips

A competitive analysis tells you what exists, not why it exists. For example, you might have a long feature list, but you won’t know which features users value and use the most.

islco / methods