Competitor Research Framework
Worked with SMEs who formed a task team to standardise competitor research and come to a common consensus.
situation
There is no set standard while doing research and therefore no concrete way of comparing and discovering the research done company-wide. There is no set format for comparative analysis for UX to follow and this results in rather vague or different analysis each time. It increased the decision making time to create a format for analysis.
task
My job was to come up with a format to compare products from a user experience perspective which is different from a marketing competitor analysis.
action
Multiple ways were explored to look at user’s experience and chalk it out in ways that made it easy to compare
#1: Features per aspect
The essence of the user journey was extracted from the flows. Keeping this constant, it was pointed out the amount and flexibility of features offered by each competitor for each aspect. As an instance, in order to set up notification system users can set up channel, recipients, messages, and monitoring. Considering this as the core aspects of setting up a message notification system, I looked at how Urban Airship, Send Pulse and Push Crew implemented it differently.
#2: No. Of steps per aspect
This to look at the number of steps taken to complete the set up of message notification. This allowed us to visually see the length of each process offered by the competitor
#3: Screens
We looked at the unique ways each competitor used the screen real estate to make the process as efficient as possible.
#4: Matrix
This was created in the internal confluence pages with features and products as the x and y axis. It shows what features exist in which product. On clicking feature it goes to a page with app competitor screenshots for the feature. If your click on a product it takes you to product screens with all its features.
result
I have subsequently used this format for competitor analysis.
