What is UX competitive analysis?
Websites survive in a competitive environment. It means users сonstantly сompare one website with others. Many marketers note that users prefer to choose a website with a better user experience, even if the prices of products are higher. Search engines also compare the user experience of websites and use an assessment to rank pages in the SERP. For example, we all know that Google’s Core Web Vitals affect ranking.
That is why many web design agencies have offered UX competitive analysis services for website owners not so long ago. This, in its turn, causes business owners to ask questions. What is UX competitive analysis? How is a competitive analysis in UX design helpful? How to conduct UX competitive analysis?
In this article, you will learn about all aspects of UX competitive analysis.
What UX competitive analysis is
UX competitor analysis is one crucial of many UX research methods and uses to identify the features, visions, and feelings evoked by the design solutions of competitors’ websites.
The main goal of UX competitive analysis is to create design solutions that outpass competitors by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the design of their sites.
The method of UX competitive research is not set in stone, and many UX specialists use their own techniques. But all methods are based on knowing the UX design principle and features like the back of your hand to be able to compare the competition sites.
Performing a competitive UX analysis should be of the earliest research steps in website design or website redesign. This way, website owners and designers can avoid making design mistakes and create a great website design that meets the target audience’s needs.
Why is UX competitive analysis important?
In short, if you want to create a better website than competitors have to drive more visitors and turn them into customers, you should conduct UX competitive analysis without any doubt.
The UX competitive analysis provides valuable information you can use to improve your site design, business process, products, or services. For example:
- know the strengths and weaknesses of competitive products, services, and sites
- identify the pros and cons of your products and services to improve them
- direct a website design process
- identify the usability and UX design issues to solve them
- define content, features, and other gaps to create a website design that completely satisfies the needs of customers
- help to develop an effective go-to-market strategy.
UX competitive analysis is worth your efforts and money because it reduces the likelihood of usability, UX design, and marketing errors, and fixing them will be costly.
Note the quality of UX competitive analysis depends on the ability of a person to understand and interpret information. That is why hiring a professional who can provide actionable insights is vital. Do not rely on beautiful pictures that show “interesting” data.
How to do a UX competitive analysis?
It is not a complete guide that can help a beginner do a great UX competitive analysis, but it helps to understand the method of UX research.
Define and understand your goals
What does a researcher want to achieve? Is it an actual goal? It would be best if you understood which issues should be addressed via UX competitive analysis. A researcher should keep the plans at the front of their mind during competitive research to achieve them. For example, a business owner wants to attract customers from search engines. Hence, a researcher must focus on UX design factors affecting website SEO.
Define competitors
Create a list of competitors. It would be best if a researcher categorized them to optimize the time of UX competitive analysis:
- Direct competition. These firms offer similar products or services at comparable prices to a target audience.
- Indirect competition. These firms offer a target audience different products or services to satisfy the exact needs a company is trying to meet.
As you guessed, you should focus your efforts on analyzing the direct competition. But studying indirect competition can provide valuable information too.
Remember that new competitors may arise.
Create a list of the website features.
Add websites features and UX elements that are useful or valuable to customers, for example:
- Website user interface style
- The text content and its tone
- Images, video
- UI design elements like filters and sorting
- CTA (Call-To-Action) elements
- Website load time
- Mobile-Friendliness
- Accessibility
- Additional customer services like shipping, warranty, refund, support, and maintenance
- User-generated reviews on the site or widgets from user review platforms like Yelp or Trustpilot
As you can see, a researcher should know which website design elements are useful and valuable for visitors and which can be the excitement features. Excitement features can be defined as features that customers might miss if you don’t have these features on your site. But if you include these features, you will create impressive customer delight.
Now a researcher can compare and assess these features on competitors’ websites. Are features present on competitors’ websites? Which features are bad/poor? Which features are good/excellent? For example, website navigation can be complex for users, and they can’t find the information they need. Content location mistakes also affect visitors’ behavior because the users who visit the site will not receive the information they were looking for. This way, the complex navigation and content location mistakes hurt business revenue. CTAs can be annoying, persuasive, or hidden, which reduces a website’s conversion rate.
When this stage is finished, you can see many valuable insights that allow web designers to create an excellent design for your site or improve an existing one.
Analyze insights and summarise
At this stage, a researcher creates a small summary and what impact the information will have. This stage aims to identify actionable insights and website design opportunities because competitors’ advantages and disadvantages are clear, as well as your own.
Now the summary can be used to direct web designers to implement website features and create an effective site for business.
Conclusion
As you can see, it’s essential to do UX competitive analysis before web designers begin a site design because it means you will deliver your target audience a better website than your competitors. But if you have no experience, it would be better to entrust your website project to professionals.
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