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Research methodCraft conventionFoundational

Competitive Analysis

Study how others solved the same problem to learn the conventions your users already hold, not to assemble a feature list.

Definition

Competitive analysis examines comparable products against defined criteria. Done well it establishes what your audience already expects and where a genuine difference is available. Done badly it produces a feature matrix that justifies copying.

Craft convention. True because the industry converged on it. Breaking it costs familiarity, not correctness.

On this page
  1. Definition
  2. Running one that is worth reading
  3. Using the result
  4. In practice
  5. Continue from here

Running one that is worth reading

  1. 1

    Define the comparison set

    Direct competitors, adjacent products solving the same job, and the products your audience uses most in general. The last group sets their conventions, and it is usually the group nobody includes.

  2. 2

    Write the criteria first

    Derived from your framed problem. Criteria chosen after looking are criteria chosen to flatter.

  3. 3

    Complete real tasks

    Sign up, buy, cancel, recover a password. Screenshots of marketing pages tell you nothing about the product.

  4. 4

    Record the decision, not the surface

    'Two-step checkout with address validation on step one' is useful. 'Clean modern design' is not.

  5. 5

    Separate convention from choice

    Where every product does the same thing, that is a convention your users hold and deviating from it costs. Where they differ, there is a decision available.

Using the result

Do

  • Note what everybody does, and treat it as the baseline expectation.
  • Note what nobody does, and ask whether that is an opportunity or a well-known dead end.
  • Capture the failure modes you hit, since competitors' bad states are the cheapest lessons available.
  • Date the analysis. It is out of date within a quarter.

Do not

  • Do not treat a competitor's design as validated. You cannot see their data, and they may be shipping a mistake.
  • Do not build a feature matrix and score it. The scoring implies a precision the method does not have.
  • Do not substitute this for talking to your own users.

In practice

The adjacent product that set the expectation

A B2B tool's users judged its search against a consumer search engine, not against other B2B tools. Including that comparison explained complaints the direct competitor analysis could not.

Continue from here

Each link says what the connection is, so you can tell a principle from an alternative from a thing people mix this up with.

Principles behind this

The reasoning this solution is an application of.

Related concept

Connected closely enough to change how you apply this.