There are a couple of frameworks that can get you started... by the way this is often referred to as market research (different than marketing research) or competitive analysis. If you search/look for references towards SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) or Porter's five factors you will find background and structures that may help - all coming from a business perspective, but they can easily be applied to design. Mark
On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Willl Hacker <[email protected]>wrote: > 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 > ________________________________________________________________ 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
