Conducting a Comprehensive Competitive Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide to Staying Ahead of the Game

A competitive audit is a crucial aspect of the ideation process, providing a comprehensive overview of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. But before we start, let’s first recap the design thinking process where the ideation process exists.

Design thinking is a methodology centered around the user that focuses on finding solutions to real-world problems. This approach enables designers to create practical, cost-effective solutions directly addressing users’ needs. The design process comprises five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

Empathize: As a UX designer, empathy is your greatest superpower because it enables you to identify UX issues that frustrate users and block them from getting what they need.

Define: a well-defined problem statement is essential for the success of your product. Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

Ideate: After you land on a user problem and know why it’s essential to solve it, the ideation process comes out to generate as many ideas as possible without judging or evaluating them. It’s vital to have a diverse team during the ideation process to ideate feasible (technically possible to build) and viable (financially benefit the business) ideas.

A competitive audit involves a comprehensive analysis of the competition in order to understand its strengths and weaknesses. This audit aims to gather data about the market and the competition, allowing for informed decision-making and strategic planning. Areas typically evaluated during a competitive audit include product offerings, target audience, pricing strategies, marketing tactics, and more. By conducting a competitive audit, businesses can gain a competitive advantage and make informed choices that put them ahead in their market. In the competitive audit, your competition can be divided into two categories: direct and indirect.

Direct competitors offer similar products and target the same audience, while indirect competitors may have similar offerings for a different audience or different offerings for the same audience. Examining both types of competitors can offer valuable insights into your designs’ direction and the users you’re designing for. Investing time in a competitive audit enables your team to gain valuable lessons from competitors’ mistakes, thereby avoiding repeating the same mistakes.

Steps to Conduct a Competitive Audit

In the following section, we will delve into the steps involved in conducting a comprehensive competitive audit through a real-life example. This will provide you with a clear understanding of the process and help you apply it effectively in your analysis.

Suppose you are a UX designer working on designing a content publishing platform similar to Medium. In order to conduct a comprehensive competitive audit, it’s essential to identify direct and indirect competitors. For this scenario, Medium serves as a direct competitor, while a platform like Gumroad, which focuses on selling digital products and content, could be considered an indirect competitor. Additionally, professional networking platforms like LinkedIn can be considered an indirect competitor in terms of content creation and distribution, as both Medium and LinkedIn provide a space for users to create, publish, and share articles and target similar audiences of individuals and businesses looking to connect and share their expertise.

To start, you would research direct and indirect competitors, analyzing their products, user experience, and target audience. Here are a few steps you can take to conduct the competitive audit:

1. Set the goal of the audit: As we design a content publishing platform similar to Medium, our goal could be to compare each competitor’s in-app writing and purchasing experience.
2. Gather data: Collect information about the competitor’s offerings, target audience, and user experience. Look at their website, app, and other relevant information to help you understand the product.
3. Identify strengths and weaknesses: Look for areas where the competitors excel and where they could improve. Analyze the product features, design, and overall user experience. Consider what makes the product unique and what could be improved.
4. Analyze the Market and Target Audience: Research the market and your target audience to gain insights into their needs, pain points, and preferences. This information will help you understand how your competitors serve the market and identify areas where you can improve.
5. Determine What Sets Your Product Apart: Use the insights from the competitive audit to determine what makes your product unique. This could be a different target audience, a unique solution to a problem, or a combination of both.
6. Develop a Plan for Implementation: Based on the insights from the competitive audit, develop a plan for applying the information to your product design and development. This could include refining your product offerings, marketing strategies, or target audience.
7. Regularly Review and Update Your Competitive Audit: As the market and your competitors evolve, regularly review and update your competitive audit to ensure you have the latest information. This will help you stay ahead of the game and continuously improve your product.
8. Organizing the Data: To simplify and streamline the information gathered, it is essential to summarize it into a comprehensive table. I prefer using a competitor audit table template, such as one created by Google. Additionally, a separate table that compares the features offered by each competitor can be designed to clearly understand each competitor’s offerings.

Competitive Audit Table

The table consists of two main sections, the General Information section, and the UX section.

General Information Section: To clarify the purpose of the general information section, it provides a high-level view of the competitors in the market, including:

1. Competitor name
2. Competitor type (direct or indirect)
3. Features
4. Website
5. Target audience
6. Unique value proposition
7. Price
8. Business size

This information can be obtained through research and analysis of the competitor’s website, marketing materials, and customer feedback. The General information section helps you to get a clear understanding of how the competitors position themselves in the market and what their core offerings are. This information can help you determine your positioning in the market, identify areas for improvement, and develop a competitive strategy.

The image below shows what the Competitive Audit Table looks like after filling in the general information section.

User Experience (UX) Section: The UX Section of the Competitive Audit Table provides an overview of the user experience offered by the competitor. The section includes the following columns to capture critical aspects of the competitor’s user experience:

1. Desktop website experience: This column captures the overall look and feel of the competitor’s desktop website.
2. Mobile website experience: This column evaluates the competitor’s mobile website, including its responsiveness, design, functionality, and usability.
3. Website Interaction: This column assesses the level of interactivity on the competitor’s website, including animations, hover effects, and other interactive elements.
4. Accessibility: This column evaluates the competitor’s website for accessibility, including using alt-text for images, apparent font size and color contrast, and other accessibility features.
5. User flow: This column examines the competitor’s user flow, including the steps a user takes to complete a task on the website and the overall usability of the website.
6. Navigation: This column evaluates the navigation structure of the competitor’s website, including the use of breadcrumb trails, menus, and other navigation elements.
7. Brand identity: This column evaluates the competitor’s brand identity, including logos, colors, and other brand elements on the website.
8. Tone: This column evaluates the tone used on the competitor’s website, including humor, professionalism, and other tone elements.
9. Descriptiveness: This column evaluates the level of descriptiveness on the competitor’s website, including clear and concise language and the availability of detailed product descriptions.
10. Screenshots: This column includes screenshots of critical sections of the competitor’s website to provide a visual representation of the competitor’s user experience.

The image below shows what the Competitive Audit Table looks like after filling in the UX section.

Final Words:
In conclusion, conducting a comprehensive competitive audit can provide valuable insights into your competition and help you identify areas for improvement in your business. By breaking down the audit into two sections, general information, and user experience, you can thoroughly analyze your competition and make informed decisions. Stay ahead of the game by regularly conducting competitive audits and staying ahead of the competition.

I hope this step-by-step guide has helped get you started with your competitive audit. For more content on UX design, follow me on Medium and LinkedIn. Thank you for reading 👏, and we look forward to connecting with you.