Comments on Competitive Analysis: Understanding the Market Context

Tony Minh Duy — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:51:01 GMT

I have just translated Jason Withrow’s article, Competitive Analysis: Understanding the Market Context, for the Vietnamese. The result can now be located at Competitive Analysis là gì? Cách phân tích Cạnh tranh. As part of the work, I registered each and every phrase in the English article as well as its translation with the machine translator VietnamQA.com so that future VietnamQA users could carry out automated translation of similar articles without too many problems.

David Larson — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:54 GMT

In addition to the great information Jason has provided, you may want to look at this article on IBM’s site (it is not a techi article): http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library…

dan patterson — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:38 GMT

Thanks for the sample deliverables. I’ve found that incorporating the Strengths and Areas for Improvement on the same page as the screen shots helps clarify points. I list these points next to a screen shot and identify them simply as (+) or (-) with an arrow indicating the specific area of the screen shot in question.

Jason Withrow — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:37 GMT

Just a quick note that two sample deliverables are linked at the end of the article.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:37 GMT

Yes a ripper article, I have just finished a couple of these types of papers and I wish had read this beforehand. Dying to get my hands on that sample so I can build a strawman from it.

Bob Huerster — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:36 GMT

Thanks for writing this terrific article, Jason. It’s very interesting and useful.

Livia Labate — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:35 GMT

quoting the article: “Other competitive analyses have focused more on usability and interaction design, with visual design also factoring in strongly. These analyses tend to be for web applications, which often have the most to gain from exploring how competitors approached a design problem or a user task/process. In some cases, the analysis could become quite narrow if the goal was to isolate a specific user task and optimize the process for that task.”

A large challenge in doing competitive analysis for content delivery sites is making a distinction between the criteria/heuristics to evaluate content and information organization, versus criteria/tasks to evaluate tasks/processes. Oftentimes large content-delivery sites have a number of built-in ‘features’ that are supportive of the main content (i.e.: the ability to set preferences or personalize a textual news site versus the textual news content itself).

Attempting to evaluate content and functionality under the same criteria or using similar heuristics can be drive you nuts. It also may force you to compromise on the specificity of the criteria/heuristic, which defeats the purpose of an evaluation of this sort, which is analysis, not synthesis.

Jason Withrow — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:35 GMT

Hi Austin and Dave, thank you for the feedback. I will look into posting a sample deliverable. For user testing I typically test 5-10 users for a within-subjects design, where each user completes the highest-priority tasks (e.g., purchasing/checkout) at every competitor site. For a between-subjects design, where each user is tested at a single competitor website, testing 3-4 users per competitor website will give plenty of detailed information with common issues already showing in the user experience for that given website.

Dave Cannon — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:35 GMT

I agree with Austin. I think the apprach is great, but a sample deliverable would be very helpful. What would also be helpful is your thoughts on the number of users you feel are necessary (minimum) to test the effectiveness of the competitor sites.

Austin Govella — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:35 GMT

Very nice explanation of how to conduct and use competitive landscape/analysis.

Could you amend the article by posting a sample document for others to see?