Member-only story
Competitive analysis is a method, not a solution
Why looking at what your competitors are doing without further context can be more harmful than helpful.
We all have been there: you have been with your team in a room for a couple of hours now, and it seems you hit a dead-end while discussing one design problem. Suddenly, someone brings up the solution for it all:
How does Facebook do it?
Did you check Airbnb?
Material design has a guideline for that!
I really like how MailChimp does it.
If Twitter does that, there might be a good reason!
Big tech companies have great design teams. Even better: they share their tools, libraries, and process with us all in well organized and accessible articles and websites.
While looking at what big tech companies are doing can be a great resource, that doesn't mean that you should copy their design solutions to answer your design problem. As soon as design decisions are based on “that’s how company X does”, we are ignoring the fundamental role of design in the first place: to improve the product with your user in the…