Comprehensive Competitive analysis
Analysis Design
Our research team was given an assignment to do a comprehensive analysis of the experience offered in the competitive landscape. With little more guidance than that, I set about creating a framework for analysis, defining the breadth of our investigation and executing the study.
Using the structure from my heuristic analysis, I designed an approach for high level and very detailed documentation of the competitive experience. Each page in the analysis was devoted to analyzing the experience for completing individual tasks.
Analysis Report
The data in this study has several layers of information, starting with an overview of the insights for each task. We called out trends across all products and pointed out key elements of competitor experiences to beat.
The overview is followed by a summary of specific insights on each competitor, which are supported with in-depth details by screen, screenshots and videos. As appropriate, we created charts and tables to organize the information unique to each page.
A few examples include tasks for Managing your Account, Website Home Pages, and Checking Out.
Note: these files have several images are too large to host on this site, so are housed in a Google Drive folder linked from the file name and image.
To deliver these results, the comprehensive analysis was shared with overview points in a lunch-and-learn format with the Marketing & Design department. The goal for this was to make our teams aware of the general approach, strengths and weaknesses of our key competitors in the competitive landscape.
Whenever a Product Manager is beginning work on a feature that includes a task specified in our analysis, we’ll set a review meeting with the PM, Tech Lead and Lead Designer. That meeting starts with some reading time. That is followed by a discussion in which I highlight points I found most important and facilitate discussion among the group about their points of interest and learning.
Feature Specific Comparative Analysis
Report
Sometimes it’s not a feature-by-feature comparison the team needs, but an holistic assessment of an approach in analogous systems. For this, I’ll use a comparative analysis. The approach is essentially the same. However, the comparisons are more about interactions, concepts and overall approach than they are about feature and brand expression.
Our new mobile app’s primary feature is appointment scheduling between . In order to identify patterns and interactions customers would find easy to adopt for scheduling appointments, I did a comparative analysis with systems ranging from medical to financial to food delivery scheduling.