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
Competitor B
Competitor C
What is often more effective is to choose a particular feature you're working on (i.e., "Onboarding") and look at how those competitors perform on that single feature.
Doing this helps you find and understand specific interactions and features without getting overwhelmed, and the smaller scope can also allow you to revisit this during your design process.
However, to begin using competitive research as a persuasion tool, you next need to have the right audience.
Understanding the right audience for competitive persuasion
Remember that "competitive" persuasion won't work for all audiences and scenarios.
The ideal case scenario is when you have a Product Manager (or someone equivalent) who knows and can identify your direct competitors. For example, when you first joined the project, your Product Manager might have said, "Look at Competitor X, Y, or Z to get a sense of what we're trying to do."
If the team is familiar with a short list of competitors, the next step is to pick a suitable competitor to use as a comparison point.
A general rule of thumb is that while we may examine a wide variety of competitors' designs, we want to compare our designs with those of companies that are equal to or smaller than you.
For example, suppose you're a medium-sized e-commerce platform. In that case, it doesn't make sense to pick Amazon as a comparison point: your team will likely respond to any comparison with, "Well yeah, but they have Amazon money and can spend more than we can."
Instead, you want to pick designs from companies equivalent (or even smaller) so that you can tell one of two stories:
Our direct competitor offers this, but we don't
We may get disrupted by this smaller company because they're doing something we're not
Once we've checked that we may be in an ideal competitive persuasion scenario, we can incorporate them into a UX Storytelling presentation.
Problem-Agitate-Solution: The framework for competitive research
One of the most accessible frameworks for leveraging competitive research is Problem-Agitate-Solution.
In the first section, you define the problem and why it matters to a particular audience. For this to be effective, it can't be a vague or generic statement; it needs to be something people can identify with.
In our example, we might say, "Our current design ran into a couple of problems with users when we got their feedback, and several sections need to be changed as a result."
Then, during the Agitate stage, you can use competitive research to amplify the problem and relevant details. For example, we might mention that "Users got stuck during onboarding, which had too many long and complex steps."
Here, we can use competitive research to highlight how we require the user to go through four steps, while our competitors typically have two to three.
By doing this, we're showcasing what our users are unhappy about and how our design is lacking compared to competitors. The simple comparison is often enough to convince your team to take action.
Doing this allows you to gracefully transition into your solution, where you hope to gain more stakeholder buy-in to fix the issues.
Comparison is always one of the most effective tools for persuasion
Being able to show where you are in relation to your competitors can often be the key to convincing even the most stubborn stakeholders to listen and pay attention.
As a result, if you need help convincing your team to make some design changes, consider whether or not showing how your competition does things can change their mind.
Doing so may not only give you additional insights into what to design, but it may also help your stakeholders understand the impact of making certain decisions.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Creator of the Data and Design newsletter. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.