5 Tips to improve your user experience analysis

Whatever kind of business you're in, having intelligence about user experience of your customer base is very valuable. Let's say you’re building your designs around actual user research, but you need more information. You need to know how your competitors stack up to your user experience. Where do you stand? Are you missing out on opportunities in your industry? If you’re doing competitive analysis you’re already on the right track. Here are 5 tips to give you a little boost.

Always go back to your user research

You spent all this time (and resources!) putting together journey maps and user personas, why would you just toss it out the window because you found a feature that you like? Remember: at the end of the day, user experience is about solving problems and improving quality for the user. What’s right for some users and businesses might not be right for you.

Don’t be afraid to analyze other industries

To that point, what is right for another might also be right for you. That’s why we do competitive analysis and benchmarking. We want to see how we measure up to other companies in terms of usability. With that said, don’t forget that a user = a user = a user. Of course different industries will have different needs, you could find an inspiring solution to a problem in your industry be looking at how someone else has solved it. Is your B2B tech software highly customizable? Could you find solutions from a B2C automotive site? Why not?

Categorize your findings with standards

When analyzing user experience for websites for instance, it’s easy to measure things like cost per lead or click through rate, but how do you measure the things that you like about other sites? The Nielsen Norman Group has some great suggestions on quality metrics including success rate, time to complete the task, and error rate. But don’t shy away from more qualitative metrics. Your team can get a lot out of in-house evaluation on a 1-7 scale. Just be sure that you’re measuring using the same yardstick.

Know/explore your limits

In comparing the usability of your product to other products, you have to be clear about the data that you can actually glean from a user experience competitive analysis. There is some information that is simply not available. This kind of information would include everything from the why of your competitor (Why did they include this/that feature?) to the specific information about traffic (to evaluate if a specific call-to-action is getting the desired conversion for example). Offering a product that works for your user is important. You have to keep testing. And while you won’t necessarily know what is working for your competitor, you can deduce that if it’s been in place for a while, it’s working.

Dedicate sufficient time

Competitive analysis can be super time consuming. Especially if you don’t have tools that will automate parts of the process for you. Taking screenshots and compiling them into a collection of meaning observations for your team could take anywhere from a few days to a few months. It just depends on how thorough the audit is.

If you're looking for an expert analysis on user experience for your brand or product executed by a specialized Market Intelligence company, contact Hammer Market Intelligence to gain access to your customer base via their international platform.

Source: Kompyte