Chapter 14: Competitive Research

Overview

Products don't exist in a vacuum. For any given service or consumer niche, there is a whole ecology of competing products. Each has a different approach to how it attends to the needs of its users. But which differences matter? Small differences in functionality, presentation, or identity can sometimes make a big difference in how people perceive a product. And sometimes they don't matter at all.

Understanding which of your competitors' strategies work and which don't is critical to understanding what will work with your product and where to focus your development energy.

Traditional competitive analysis is performed by the business development group or by independent auditors. The goal is to look at a company's offerings and analyze them from a financial or marketing perspective. By examining public documents and doing field research, they can understand things such as how much their competitors' products cost, who buys them, where their customers live, and what aspects get emphasized in advertising. This is valuable information that helps executives make strategic decisions about the general direction of the company and its products. However, it doesn't do a whole lot for understanding which parts of a product people actually use, what they like about it, or what keeps them coming back. That's the realm of competitive user experience research.

Most of the techniques discussed in this book can be applied to your competitors' work nearly as well as to your own. They can reveal your competition's strengths and weaknesses, and help you identify opportunities and threats. In some sense, competitive research is the purest user research of all since it ignores the assumptions or constraints under which the other products were constructed and concentrates purely on the user's perspective. This makes it some of the most useful research of all.