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Competitive Analysis - Lesson 3When starting an e-business, it is important to take the time to learn about your competitors. Whether you are just casually browsing your rivals' websites or systematically evaluating each and every competitor, you need to be aware of what other sites are doing in order to be competitive. Start your competitive analysis by making a list of your competition. You may have to ask around and search the Internet. Next, you want to generate a set of criteria including features that you can use to evaluate each site. A good place to start is with your goals. These will form the basis for your marking criteria. As you perform your analysis, be sure to add any feature or functionality you find interesting to your list. Criteria include things such as page size, layout, look, feel and download time. You may want to create a spreadsheet with the name of each site as columns and the features and criteria as rows. This will allow you to see all the information at a glance and to compare sites easily. Each feature or criterion can be evaluated in two ways: a simple check mark or a rating out of 10. For example, evaluating the look and feel would be a rating whilst seeing if they have a newsletter would be a check mark. The actual evaluations are easy to do but you need to ensure you are thorough. Apart from your evaluation spreadsheet, try and take some notes and screen shots. These will help you remember why certain sites fared better than others. Finally, document the results. Write down the pros and cons, for each site and include your notes and screen shots. You should also create a schedule to review your competition, as they will change over time. Three to six months is probably the amount of time you should allow before re-evaluating your competitors' websites. Competitive analysis can be time consuming so get some help from your team. However, don't neglect this step because you need to know what the competition is doing! The Design DocumentWe hope you have been documenting what you have done over the last two lessons.
Create a new chapter in your design document called Competitive Analysis. Write
a summary of the competitive analysis and add it to the design document. The
complete competitive analysis should be included as an appendix to your design
document. Remember to publish these results so that everyone in your team can
go through them. |