I've been tasked with documenting how one of my company's user interfaces compares with our top three competitors, as a way of understanding where we excel, where we need improvement, and where we are roughly equal. The business goal is to more fully understand the UI conventions used by these sites so we better anticipate what customers coming to us from the competition bring in the way of expectations. We'd like to know what our competition does well to make sure we aren't lacking in that area, and where there is an opportunity to improve on what they are doing to provide a possibly better experience.
I'm wondering if anyone has seen a good report format for recording the observations of the four sites. I was thinking of using Nielsen's heuristics checklist as a starting point, but would like to know if anyone has done this kind of analysis and how they performed it. Another approach I'm considering is one I found on the IBM website: http://tinyurl.com/davyr5 I recognize this type of analysis involves a certain amount of subjectivity and does not address things like the users' domain knowledge and the context in which the customers use the sites so it will be impossible to make absolute statements about what works and what doesn't. I'm curious how you would approach this task. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
