Competitive UX Intelligence

by Nathalie Barthe

In our product design and development world, UX practitioners will often look at competition with traditional marketing glasses. We compare our product with similar products in terms of features (current and future) and branding qualities like desirability and customer satisfaction. At UxPA this year, I attended a presentation by Beverly Freeman from eBay titled Competitive UX Intelligence: A Primer that proposes a new and interesting way to include user experience in the competitive intelligence mix.

In addition to product, strategy and brand lenses, Mrs. Freeman argues that a UX lens can “enrich the story” of our competitive intelligence analysis. Through the UX lens, she encourages us to look not only at the direct user experience of a competitor product but also at the experiences that are around and having impacts on your product UX, from start to end. She categorizes those experiences into 4 types (in orange below).

Source: Freeman, Beverly. Competitive UX Intelligence: A Primer, UxPA 2013.

An upstream competitor is “someone or something that makes people choose not to use your product because of what they have to deal with before using your product”.  Drive-thru Starbucks or grocery stores with close-to-entry parking spaces that are reserved for family are examples she gave to illustrate competing upstream user experiences.

A downstream competitor is “someone or something that makes people choose not to use your product because of what they have to deal with after using your product”.  As an example of that type of competition, Mrs. Freeman talked about how some cloth baby diapers providers are offering a pick-up service to avoid environment-conscious parents to have to wash their darlings’ dirty diapers.

A companion competitor is “someone or something that makes people choose not to use your product because of what they have to deal with while using your product”.  Good examples discussed by the presenter are how ladies’ fashion stores have put comfy chairs beside fitting rooms for a shopping friend or spouse. Or just think about Ikea Småland, where kids play while you shop.   

An analogous competitor is “someone or something in a different domain that provides inspiration for or impacts people’s expectations of your product”.  Mrs. Freeman gave the following examples of analogous competitors for any products: online car insurance quotes that are offering more transparent price setting; Virgin America, who is now showing a funny video on A320 safety at the beginning of flights to make it less boring and promote attention.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyygn8HFTCo

In addition to this fruitful, in my opinion, UX competitive intelligence framework, Beverly Freeman quickly presented some other methods to include UX in competitive analysis. I summarize those in the table below.

Usability add-ons	Add tasks for competitor's products to your existing studies.
Mental model diagramming	Add a competitor layer to a visualization of user’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Competitive benchmarking  The Golden Circle, S. Sinek	Compare your product to the competition based on: usability metrics like success rates, errors, and satisfaction  the 4 elements of a UX model of value, usability, adoptability and desirability “The Golden Circle” where the “Why” (the producer’s beliefs) is an important reason for the customer's adoption of a product or a brand.

Finally, Mrs. Freeman talked about the traps one can fall into when doing UX competitive intelligence. She talked about “starting with the wrong goal” by only trying to identify other product’s mistakes, coupled with “being too competitor-focused”, which is resulting in “fixing” your product by adding the competition’s features and benefits instead of using competitive intelligence to create real product experience differentiators.

In summary, I found this presentation enlightening, pointing out how we often analyze the UX of our products in a vacuum. With her UX competitive intelligence framework and add-on analysis methods, Beverly Freeman clearly demonstrated how a UX lens can expand one’s comparison with competitors by looking at the holistic experience of a product. I believe this approach can better enable UX practitioners to surpass the competition by really innovating rather than only adding to the feature sets and ease-of-operation of our products.

References:

Freeman, Beverly. UX Competitive Intelligence: A Primer.

Sinek, Simon. How great leaders inspire action.