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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.

Caio Braga
UX Collective
6 min readJun 26, 2018
Pineapples might look cool, but that doesn't mean that every fruit should be spiky. (source)

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…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Caio Braga

designer @ SurveyMonkey, editor @ UX Collective

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