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Assignment Background

As a UX Designer, we're often told not to reinvent the wheel based on Jakob's Law. In one of our lectures, we were taught how to identify and analyze competitors to see how they approach the problem we discovered in research. With this in mind, we gained the knowledge on identifying the correct competitors (both direct and indirect) and analyzing the correct data to prevent reinventing the wheel and save time.

Assignment Task

Our assignment was to conduct a competitive analysis on 3 direct & indirect competitors then identify any key takeaways. Although we worked off a template (working with the fact that most workplaces use templates), we were purposefully challenged to identify unnecessary data fields OR missing data fields relating to our solution.

What was a hard part you faced during the assignment?

Understanding which sets of data should be in a competitive analysis proved to be biggest challenge. Time is precious commodity in a UX career so, I needed to practice prioritizing important data sets. I took careful time to consider if data sets such as "funding rounds" or "revenue streams" to be important. I alleviated the issue by asking myself…

Would this category be required to answer my problem statement?

When the assignment was turned in, I managed to cut 40% of the data fields, saving myself from wasted hours and effort.

Feedback and Learnings

Use your competitor's products

Taking the time and effort to make an account for each competitor proved to be valuable. I was able to approach it from the user perspective and understand any potential shortcomings. Without making an account, a "quick surface view" would not offer the same in-depth data I collected.

Analyze the UI critically

I took time to break down UI interactions and analyze them. I discovered that Rumble hides their view count behind a hover animation in order to decrease viewership biases. Critical UI analysis of competitors ended up helping me draft my solution.