Website Competitor Analysis

As a business that competes for market share online it is vital that you stop to take a look at how your competitors websites are doing. As part of our usability research we like to closely review key aspects of your competitions offering in order to understand your positioning and look at ways in which you can improve your own online presence.

Benefits of this service

Competitor analysis identifies the strengths and weaknesses of competing products or services before starting work on prototypes.

Advantages

• To discover the strengths and weaknesses of competing products or services
• To develop a list of issues that need to be addressed in order to compete effectively online
• To gain consensus among a group of project stakeholders
• To generate understanding of competitors' past, present (and most importantly) future strategies
• This method may also result in a list of desirable features that the new product could include

Disadvantages

• Can take some time to develop tasks and criteria to assess against
• Low-level content inventory of the competitor can be time consuming

The approach

By examining your competitor's offerings (User Centered Design, navigation, interaction styles) we can identify the features, functionality and design elements of your competitor's sites that work well for customers. Once identified our recommendations clearly show how these elements can be reapplied to your offering and often present opportunities for further innovation to stay ahead of your competition. More importantly a usability competitor analysis can ascertain which aspects of your competitor's sites are not usable and help you to avoid the same pitfalls.

The process

We recruit a representative sample of your audience and that of your competitor's. These participants are asked to perform a series of tasks using your site, that are typical of those a user would attempt in the real world. Afterwards the participants perform the same tasks using your competitor's website (the order is changed for each participant). While performing the tasks at our state of the art usability facilities, the participants are observed and recorded. Afterwards participants are interviewed to gather further information about their experience.

The deliverables

We would typically look to deliver the following to your organisation as part of our competitor analysis:

Usability Report - detailed document outlining our methodology, results and their interpretation plus actionable recommendations.

Video highlights - edited video clips of the most informative parts of the tests.

Presentation - an oral presentation communicating the most important findings and recommendations.

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