Definición RápidaA competitive analysis (or benchmarking) is a research process that involves identifying your competitors and evaluating their products, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses in comparison to your own product or idea.
What Is a Competitive Analysis?
Imagine you are the coach of a soccer team. Before an important match, you do not just train your team; you also study recordings of your rival’s games. You analyze their playing style, who their star players are, what their usual tactics are, and where they make mistakes. You are not doing this to copy them, but to prepare a counter-strategy that exploits their weaknesses and neutralizes their strengths.
A competitive analysis in UX is that game-film review. It is a structured investigation of what your competitors do to inform your own design and product decisions.
Why Is It Important?
- Understand the market standard: It helps you understand what features and design patterns users expect in a product like yours.
- Identify opportunities: By analyzing your competitors’ weaknesses, you can find “gaps” in the market or user frustrations that your product can solve better.
- Inspire solutions: Seeing how others have solved similar problems can give you ideas for your own designs (but be careful about copying blindly!).
- Inform decision-making: It provides a solid argument to justify your decisions. “I propose this flow because our main competitors do it in a very confusing way, as shown here…”
How Is It Done?
- Identify your competitors:
- Direct: They offer a very similar product to yours (e.g., McDonald’s and Burger King).
- Indirect: They solve the same user need with a different solution (e.g., for the need to “eat something quick,” an indirect competitor of McDonald’s is a sandwich shop).
- Define the evaluation criteria: What are you going to compare? Create a matrix or a table. The columns are your competitors and the rows are the criteria. Some common criteria are:
- Key features
- Onboarding flow
- Pricing model
- UI/UX quality
- Tone of voice and brand
- Strengths and Weaknesses (from your perspective)
- Collect the information: Use your competitors’ products. Take screenshots, record flow videos, read their app store reviews, etc. Fill in your matrix with your findings.
- Analyze and summarize: Look for patterns. What do they all do well? What do they all do poorly? Where can you differentiate? Create an executive summary with 3-5 key conclusions and recommendations.
Mentor Tips
- Do not just make a feature list: A competitive analysis is not just a checklist of “they have this and we do not.” Analyze the complete experience. A competitor may have fewer features but a much more coherent and pleasant experience.
- Be a real user: Sign up, complete a flow, try to contact support. The only way to truly understand a competitor’s experience is to use their product.
- Look outside your industry: Sometimes the best inspiration comes from products that are not direct competitors. If you are designing a finance app, look at how Netflix manages subscriptions or how Duolingo handles onboarding.
- It is an artifact, not a continuous process: Unlike other research activities, competitive analysis is usually done at the beginning of a project or periodically (e.g., once a year), not every week.
Resources and Tools
- Tools:
- Spreadsheets: Google Sheets or Airtable are perfect for creating the comparison matrix.
- Inspiration: Mobbin, Pageflows, and other “spy-design” sites are useful for seeing screens and flows from other apps.
- Articles:
- Competitive Analysis: Understanding the Market Context - Nielsen Norman Group