A better way to do competitive analysis
Competitive Analysis is one of the most common research methods for Researchers, Designers, Product Managers, and other people who do research. 44% of people polled in the UserInterviews 2023 State of User Research Survey reported that they use competitive analysis in their work at least often.
When I read case studies or in working with people, competitive analysis usually looks like doing a feature comparison. People make a list of other companies and products they consider to be competitors, they make a list of features and then put a check mark for which products have which features. It usually looks something like this
While this approach is useful for seeing how you compare with competitors on the level of “what features do we have that our competitors don’t have?” and “what features don’t we have that our competitors do?”, it is not enough to go straight into making Business, Product and Design decisions.
The main limitation is that it can lead to a copy paste, competitor driven design process. How many times have you heard, or even said, something like we need to build an app because Product B has one.
The problem with this is that you have no insight into why Product B has an app. You don’t know if it’s something their customers demanded for. Or if they did any research. You don’t know the goals that led them to creating the app. You don’t know if the app is successful (yes, it may have 1,000,000 downloads, what is the user activation rate or the engagement rate and so on. I have downloaded many apss and never used them).
You don’t even know whether they’re doing any kind of research or using any feedback source, whether quantitative or qualitative. You don’t even know if you have the same core / primary audience. Yes, both products could be targeting Creators. But what if you’re more focused on Video Creators (YouTubers, TikTokers etc) and they’re more focused on Audio Creators (Podcasters).
Innovation doesn’t lie in copying what others are doing. It lies in really understanding the problems, the needs, and the gaps. So, to get the most out of competitive research, you can explore one of the following approaches. I’ve grouped by whether it is Qualitative or Quantiative and how much it costs in terms of time, effort, and money.
Qualitative Approaches
Low Cost: App Store Reviews & Social Listening
App Store Reviews and Social Media are treasure troves of insights and a great place to start.
Like you and everyone else, the people who use your products are talking about it on social media. Especially the things they hate or that they find frustrating or that they wish you’d add.
App Store Reviews also often highlight customer requests, complaints, discoverability and usability issues, and other useful feedback. Go beyond comparing app store ratings to looking at the content of the reviews on your competitor apps. There are tools that allow you pull in this data and do your own analysis.
You could find insights like “10% of feature requests in competitor X and Y app store reviews include Feature A”. If you have Feature A, this could be a signal to your marketing team that they need to make this feature more visible in marketing materials. If you don’t have Feature A, you could decide to do more research on why [potential] customers are requesting for this feature.
High Cost: Competitive Interviews
A competitive user interview study is similar to your regular user interview, only that in this case, you deliberately recruit people who use competitor products.
You can uncover unmet needs, learn about why they use competitor products, what they like and what they don’t like, and so on. These interviews can be used to probe deeper into what you’ve uncovered from App Store reviews, like in the example shared earlier.
Quantitative Approaches
Low Cost: Surveys
Surveys aren’t usually my favourite research tool, but they can be very useful for competitive analysis around self reported behaviours and attitudes. You can answer questions around awareness (how much do people in your target audience know your product compared to competitors’ products), discoverability (how well do people know the features you offer compared to that of your competitors), and desirability (how do people feel about your product compared to competitors).
On a more advanced level, you could take some of the features from your Feature Comparison Table and conduct a Max Diff, Conjoint Analysis, or KANO survey to prioritise features and aid decision making.
There are also standard surveys such as the System Usability Score (SUS) and User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) that you could include in your survey.
High Cost: Competitive Usability Benchmarking / Testing
Finally, you can get better insights about the usability of your product (or specific features) compared to that of your competitors by running a Competitive Usability Testing session.
You would need to highlight the key tasks your product has in common with the competitors you would like to compare with. You would also need to determine whether you want to recruit people who use those products or people with no experience with any of the products. You also need to decide whether you’d have the same participants test all the products or have different, similar participants do the tests.
Ideally, you’ll be looking primarily at quantitative metrics. This could be perception metrics such as “ease of use” ratings and / or performance metrics such as Task Success Rate and Error Rate. However, you can also collect some qualitative feedback from these sessions.
Competitive analysis can do more than provide a list of features you have in common with your competitors. Using the approaches listed, you can get qualitative and quantitative, self reported and observed insights about the expectations and experiences that people have about both your product and that of competitors. This will also help you make better decisions in the long run.
