Sizing up the competition: How to run competitive analysis of user experience

You're not the only one trying to build a flawless user experience.

The market is filled with companies building unique product features, experimenting with UX strategies, and delivering fresh design solutions to improve the customer experience.

So how do you get ahead?

By analyzing your competitor's UX, you can size up the competition and learn from their mistakes and identify new opportunities to improve your user experience.

Read on to get a headstart on observing what you’re up against—here’s how to conduct competitive UX analysis in four quick steps, with the help of our downloadable template.

UX competitive analysis offers a behind-the-scenes assessment of your competition. From design decisions to market standards and untapped opportunities.

UX competitive analysis helps inform your UX design process by allowing you to:

There’s no wrong time to conduct a competitive analysis for UX. However, you can reap the most benefits by performing it in early stages of the design process, during discovery and then user research. By conducting a UX competitive analysis early on, you can use insights to inform your entire UX workflow while avoiding costly, resource-draining mistakes.

During product discovery, you haven’t yet started designing solutions. Instead, you’re setting objectives, building user personas, and researching competitors to guide your design and product development process.

To gain relevant UX insights from your competitors, you need to establish an analysis process.

Before beginning, define your competitor analysis objectives. Consider whether you’re looking to complete a high-level analysis of competitors’ entire digital experiences, or if you want to get a comprehensive view of specific website or app features. Once you’ve identified the scope of your work, it’s time to get started.

Begin by identifying competitors and placing their names within a competitive analysis matrix (like the handy template above!). There are two main types of competitors you’ll be assessing within the market:

As a general rule of thumb, look for three to five direct competitors and two indirect competitors to analyze.

To find your competitors:

For example, say you’re building a platform that helps users identify deals on airline tickets. You’ve found a direct competitor called AirflyBuddy. Let’s plot it on the Matrix:

Once you’ve identified your competitors, it’s time to look at what they do well, what they could do better, and what you should focus on within your own design solution.

Specifically, look to these areas:

1. Positioning: How each competitor defines themselves in the market and differentiates themselves.

2. Pricing: The cost structure of each competitor’s product or service.
While this isn’t directly related to UX, it’s always helpful to have on hand, and can help compare functionalities to pricing during your evaluation.

3. Features and usability: Your competitors’ functionality and how easy their products/ services are to use—we’ll dive into this in more detail shortly.

4. Specific flow tests: Analyze the different flows users engage with when completing tasks, and score them out of five.
Considering our flight ticket example, the flow tests could be:

As you go, place observations in your UX competitor analysis matrix. For user flows, assign a score from a 1-5 rating scale (five being the best) based on usability:

With all the competitor data you’ve collected, you’re ready to start analyzing. There are a few ways to approach competitor analysis. For example, SWOT works well when conducting competitive product analysis, and can also be of great use for UX competitive analysis. It allows you to uncover:

After the SWOT analysis, you can also conduct a Heuristic Evaluation. This set of 10 rules created by Jakob Nielsen covers principles of accessibility, usability, and UI design, to assess how your competitors’ user interfaces meet usability testing standards.

Finally, consider taking your analysis one step further, with other UX research methods like UX surveys, user interviews, or focus groups. Gathering additional data from a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods helps paint a complete picture of your competitor’s product, providing more in-depth analysis on why your users like or dislike a competitor’s product.

What follows after doing competitive analysis? Gather insights into one document—in your UX research repository, if you have one. If you’ve conducted UX competitor analysis before creating your UX design solution, you now have the chance to pre-empt mistakes, and can identify opportunities to provide a better experience for users.

Together with your team, brainstorm potential ideas, guidelines, and workflows based on your insights. Create a UX report containing all your insights to ensure stakeholders and other team members are on the same page. By surfacing these findings now, as rationale for your UX strategy, you can get stakeholder buy-in early on.

If you’ve conducted competitive design analysis in the middle, or even after, the product development process, look for actionable ways to improve specific UX and UI elements and enhance the user experience—whether this is with a new feature, updating an existing one, or taking these learnings forward to your next product.

When you’re conducting competitive analysis, there are five main UX and UI elements that you should pay attention to. These elements are the building blocks of a product’s digital experience, so paying special attention to them will help you get more granular with your UX competitive analysis.

A competitor site’s interface design determines how visually appealing and understandable the digital experience is to users. The layout, aesthetic, typography, and use of color schemes play a pivotal role in creating a positive first impression for users.

When looking at competitors, consider how UI elements (buttons, menus, fonts, imagery) detract or add to a positive experience and if they align with the target audience—run your competitor’s product through our UI design checklist to see how it fares.

Clear information architecture and smooth navigation ensure users can find what they’re looking for when using a digital product. When observing competitors, pay special attention to how they organize information—consider whether it stands out against your own product’s IA, or other competitors’.

Look at elements like menu design, categorization, search functionality, and consistency of navigation elements. Finally, assess if users can navigate between different website sections with ease—explore your competitor’s platform first-hand experience, or conduct card sorting and tree testing to see how the results compare with the current design.

One of the key considerations during a UX competitive analysis is usability. This refers to how easily users can complete their desired tasks within the product. If there are too many signs of bad user experience or usability issues, users will abandon the task and product in search of an easier experience.

Consider all of the key flows that competitors offer, then try these out. Are they intuitive? Is the path to success clear? If not, there’s a key opportunity for you to develop an easier alternative. But don’t just look at user flows. Also consider the general usability of the product—such as how you move from one screen to the next, or locating the functionality you’re looking for.

Branding is about more than appearance—it’s how your competitors present their product to users, and how it makes users feel. Consistent uses of logos, fonts, colors, and messaging all impact a company’s identity, its values, and the overall user experience.

When analyzing competitors, consider if their brand identity is clear, strong, and if it resonates with their potential users and customers. Does it stand out versus other competitors? What are they doing differently (or the same), and is it working? Ethnographic research and conducting surveys can be a great way to quickly gather user feedback on branding, from its visual appeal to its trustworthiness.

Accessibility and inclusivity in UX design ensure all users can interact with a product. While accessibility isn’t just a nice-to-have, it is a key factor in how you can assess competitors and stand out from the crowd. When analyzing other products, consider elements like keyboard navigation, color contrast, screen reader compatibility, and support for assistive technologies.

You should also gauge competitors’ adherence to legal accessibility standards such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). If you want to go a step further, assess the inclusivity of competitor imagery and language to ensure a diverse representation of different user needs.

UX competitor analysis is crucial early on in the UX research design process. It helps you better understand the market and why users prefer certain digital experiences over others. However, to really understand your users and build experiences grounded in user-centered design, your most important step is to conduct research with real users.

Maze is the leading user research platform that empowers companies to get game-changing user insights to drive data-backed decisions.

Whether you want to run Interview Studies to gauge how users feel about competitor UX, or conduct Live Website Testing to see how they interact with your own pages—Maze delivers quality user insights in moments; allowing your design team to move at the speed of product development.

Start analyzing your competitor’s UX today with our ready-to-use template, and begin digging deeper into how you can outshine the competition.