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How to use competitive evaluation to influence decision-makers
How comparing designs with competitors can persuade stubborn stakeholders
Competitive evaluation doesn't just help you see what your competitors are doing; it can also be used to persuade your team.
I heard that advice from Jeff White, a former Amazon UX lead, but it wasn't until I worked with specific teams and scenarios that I saw its effectiveness.
Sometimes, the best way to convince certain team members isn't a logical rationale laying out the advantages of a particular design. Instead, it's to show them that their competitors are beating them to the punch or making mistakes we don't have to.
To understand how to do this, we first need to understand how competitive research works.
Competitive research and how it can tie into presentations
I will focus on Competitive Reviews because they're easier to implement, and we don't have to go too far in depth to persuade our team.
A typical competitive evaluation usually involves looking at 2–4 competitor's sites that have the following characteristics:
- Offer similar content and functionality to your site (or what you strive towards)
- Are competitors your customers are most likely to compare you against
- Have a good user experience
- (Optional) Have Future features you may want to design
- etc.
During competitive reviews, the purpose is to test the strengths and weaknesses of interaction, design, and feature functionality. Many designers approach this by conducting broad, competitive research early on during the discovery process to get an overall sense of the competition.
However, to turn competitive reviews into a persuasive tool, it's better to have a much narrower feature focus that you can revisit. So, for example, if you uncover the following competitors in the overall market:
- Competitor A
