Now that I am moving on to my 2nd app it means that I am starting over from step one which include competitive analysis, reviews, and user interviews. Learning about and understanding a products competition should always be done because it helps you to determine how that product stands in the current market. It can also help you determine if any changes should be made based on the evidence you collect. In addition, competitive analysis can also assist when it comes to solving usability problems. InteractionDesign.org defines ‘usability’ as “a measure of how well a specific user in a specific context can use a product/design to achieve a defined goal effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily.” Usability can be used throughout the design process- from prototyping to final product.
Market gaps can also be found through competitive analysis and can lead to the discovery of features that haven’t been used. A designer can then capitalize on this by including the feature in their product. UsabilityGeek.com identifies the steps of a competitive analysis as understanding your goals, knowing your competition, looking for similarities with competitors, analyzing and summarizing your research, and presenting your analysis. Toptal.com lists the following as some of the aspects that make up a competitive analysis.
Competitor’s name
Competitor’s URL
The number of users/downloads — mainly to identify the effectiveness of the platform
Number of years the platform or product has been in use (optional)
The main features being offered by competitors
Cost of service/product
Additional notes
According to Chandan Mishra, a good competitive analysis is on that helps with, “Identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own product or service.”
Once the competitive analysis has been completed it is then time to move on to user interviews. These give us unique insight into someone’s thoughts and actions. They can also help by sorting out certain data such as ethnographic or demographic data. This in turn can be used when creating a certain persona. Typically when one thinks of an interview one person is asking questions while another person is answering them. During this time the person who is asking the questions will record what the other person is saying. It is important to note that there are several different types of note-taking. They include descriptive, inferential, and evaluative. A descriptive note-taker would write down what they see while an inferential note-taker would user inference to describe what they are observing. An evaluative note-take would make. a judgement based off of inference and behavior.
InteractionDesign.org has listed some of the typical topics that are often covered in interviews. They can include background information, use of technology in general, the use of the product, a users main objectives and motivations, as well as the users pain points. Usability testing often has it’s own kind of interview which is known as a contextual interview This is done after the researcher has observed the user using the product. The point of this is to gain context while the product is in use.
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