AA_Arland
02-06-2008, 10:51 AM
Presenting Competitive Analyses
When planning a presentation, you must first determine the purpose of your meeting, and then how you want to structure it.
Meeting purpose
In the context of user experience, there are two main purposes to a competitive analysis: justifying an overall strategy for the design and justifying a specific set of design decisions. Therefore, the purpose of your competitive analysis presentation will be one of these two things. To this end, you might combine the presentation of your competitive analysis with the presentation of other strategy documentation or design documentation.
Providing justification for design
Besides describing each of the criteria you looked at, there are a couple of other things you should include in your presentation.
Balance competitive research with user research. When presenting results from a competitive analysis, compare what you found against what users have asked for. Your presentation should show where there is a disconnect between a competitor’s site and your target audience, as well as instances where a competitor’s site does a good job meeting user needs.
Have an opinion. You’re the expert, and if your clients don’t put you on the spot explicitly, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear your opinion. Express what you like or dislike about each competitor. Talk about what works for you and what doesn’t work for you.
For designers, be explicit about design direction. If your presentation is strictly internal, your team members will want some kind of bottom line—a core set of take-aways they can bring back to their desks to help focus their efforts.
Providing justification for strategy
“Strategy” can mean a lot of things. When using competitive research to make overall decisions about the direction of the web site, the key to the presentation is identifying what role the research plays in your decision making.
Identify the focus of the research. Before diving into the specific differences between various competitors, you can provide some background by stating what it is you were looking for in the competitive analysis. Typical background questions for an overall strategy might relate to the industry baseline for a set of features, the scope and breadth of content available, or the balance between original content and advertising. By stating these issues up front, you’ve given the stakeholders some context for the presentation.
Meeting structure
Once you have a sense of the purpose of your meeting, you can decide upon an agenda. Competitive analyses are the kind of story that can be hard to tell because there are two main dimensions—the characters and the moral. There are pros and cons to each. Focus too much on the competitors, and the main message (the moral) is lost. Spend too much time on the conclusions, and your stakeholders might wonder whether you’re just pushing your own agenda. Still, the meeting structure needs a spine, a central focus to keep conversation moving in the right direction, and this can be either one of these dimensions.
Competitor-driven story
It may seem counterintuitive, but since the competitors will form the basic structure of the meeting, you should actually start with an account of the criteria. Provide an overview of the criteria at the top of the meeting to set the stage and then dig into each competitor more specifically. Describe how each competitor measured up in each aspect.
This approach works well for laying the landscape and for addressing broader issues, like how each site serves the needs of its target audience. By taking the stakeholders on a tour of the competition, you give them a sense of what they’re up against. This walking-tour approach helps answer broad strategic questions, such as which features are available on the site, what appears most prominently on the home page, and how the site prioritizes content, but not specific design issues, such as comparing the treatment of “add to cart” buttons.
Though a competitor-driven approach is best for discussing larger strategic issues, it can also work well for specific design problems. If you’re looking at just one aspect of the design, your meeting can show how the particular design problem was solved for each competitor. When discussing a specific design problem, your meeting can end with the conclusions, drawing together lessons learned from all the competitors.
Moral-driven story
Instead of structuring your presentation in terms of the competitors and walking through all the issues for each competitor separately, this approach takes the opposite tack: For each issue, you talk about how each competitor stacks up against the others. To set the stage, provide a short overview of the competitors. You don’t need to get into comparing them at this point, but instead describe why they were included in the study.
The presentation then focuses on your conclusions. For each conclusion, you’ll first need to describe the criteria you looked at to arrive at the conclusion—in other words, what you analyzed on each site.
For example, you might conclude that the highest level navigation categories on a pet-related web site are usually pet-type, but that this isn’t the only system of categorization used on the site. To support this conclusion, you looked at three different criteria: the navigation categories on the home page, the metadata attached to products in the catalog and other content, and the structure of intermediate “gallery” pages (galleries are lists of products or content that appear on the user’s path between the home page and the product or content page). Finally, within each of these criteria, you make observations about each of the competitors. This structure is useful for both high-level strategy analyses and specific design problems: The content of the conclusions may be different, but the logic behind them is essentially the same. In this approach, the criteria do not disappear, but become a bridge between your conclusions and your observations.
Presentation risks
When presenting a competitive analysis, you might run into a few snags. You may have moments when the conversation is either derailed—a stakeholder brings up an issue that calls the methodology or the results into question—or gets way off topic. Here are a couple of ways your presentation might spin out of control, and how to reel it back in.
Maintain perspective
The worst way for a meeting to get off topic is to get too caught up in the competition. Although you’ve invited people to the meeting to discuss your site’s competitors, it can be easy to lose perspective on the purpose of the competitive analysis. Symptoms of this problem include getting stuck on one particular design element in a meeting about strategy, or spending too much time talking about one competitor over others. Even though your competitive analysis is meant to address one particular design problem, you might find conversation straying from that design problem into other areas of the site, or your participants might start talking about more strategic issues.
If the conversation is productive, you may not see this as a risk at all. However, if you have a specific agenda and certain goals for the meeting, these kinds of digressions may not be productive regardless of how interesting they are. To get back on track, jump in and remind the participants of the purpose of the meeting. One way to help stop this problem before it happens is to write the purpose of the meeting on a whiteboard or flipchart at the very beginning. If someone attempts to stray too far, you can always point to the meeting purpose and look very stern. You won’t be popular, but you’ll be respected for running a good meeting.
Know the rationale behind your methods
As you present the results of your competitive analysis, you may run into troublesome meeting participants who question your methodology. They may raise questions about your selection of competitors or criteria, or your technique for capturing data.
There is only one surefire way to address this risk: Don’t invite these people to the meeting. But, if that’s unavoidable (and it usually is), the second best way to address the problem is preparation. Methodological questions are easy to anticipate, and if you think about your rationale before going into the meeting, you can usually quash these hecklers. (OK, maybe they have legitimate concerns, but you don’t have to like it.)
Say you’re building this pet web site, for example, and your analysis looked at a handful of sites. That might not stop one of your participants from saying, “I do all my online shopping at JeffersPet.com. Why isn’t that in your competitive analysis?” If you’ve done your homework, you can respond with “Given the time constraints on the competitive analysis, we had to keep the number of sites down to four. We included DrsFosterSmith.com among our reviewed sites to represent the non-retail-store competitors. If, after our presentation, you think there are some aspects represented in JeffersPet.com that we missed, let’s talk about it offline.” Ah, the offline discussion, the Internet consultant’s secret weapon.
Open your mind to varying interpretations
It’s one thing for meeting participants to question the number of competitors or your method for scoring, quite another for them to poke holes in your analysis. Questioning your conclusions is a scarier risk than questioning the methodology, but in reality you may be less married to your conclusions.
In other words, once you’ve done the research for your competitive analysis, a serious concern in your methodology might mean throwing out the entire analysis and starting again. Questioning a conclusion, on the other hand, means revisiting the data for a different interpretation. If you’re convinced of your conclusions, be prepared to defend them vehemently. If you’re open to discussion about what the data mean, try spreading out the data and soliciting alternative interpretations. This could lead to worthwhile discussion.
Unfortunately, the only way to mitigate this risk may be to revisit the raw data. If you can rationalize your conclusion, you may not need extensive discussion (which would derail the meeting), but if you try to simply quash the criticism of your conclusions, your clients may start to question your integrity as a consultant. A vehement defense of ideas is one thing, but outright defensiveness is another. The bottom line is that you need to go into these meetings with the mental and emotional preparation to both unpack your conclusions and to go back to the raw data and observations if necessary.
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/competitive_analysis_part_2/
When planning a presentation, you must first determine the purpose of your meeting, and then how you want to structure it.
Meeting purpose
In the context of user experience, there are two main purposes to a competitive analysis: justifying an overall strategy for the design and justifying a specific set of design decisions. Therefore, the purpose of your competitive analysis presentation will be one of these two things. To this end, you might combine the presentation of your competitive analysis with the presentation of other strategy documentation or design documentation.
Providing justification for design
Besides describing each of the criteria you looked at, there are a couple of other things you should include in your presentation.
Balance competitive research with user research. When presenting results from a competitive analysis, compare what you found against what users have asked for. Your presentation should show where there is a disconnect between a competitor’s site and your target audience, as well as instances where a competitor’s site does a good job meeting user needs.
Have an opinion. You’re the expert, and if your clients don’t put you on the spot explicitly, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear your opinion. Express what you like or dislike about each competitor. Talk about what works for you and what doesn’t work for you.
For designers, be explicit about design direction. If your presentation is strictly internal, your team members will want some kind of bottom line—a core set of take-aways they can bring back to their desks to help focus their efforts.
Providing justification for strategy
“Strategy” can mean a lot of things. When using competitive research to make overall decisions about the direction of the web site, the key to the presentation is identifying what role the research plays in your decision making.
Identify the focus of the research. Before diving into the specific differences between various competitors, you can provide some background by stating what it is you were looking for in the competitive analysis. Typical background questions for an overall strategy might relate to the industry baseline for a set of features, the scope and breadth of content available, or the balance between original content and advertising. By stating these issues up front, you’ve given the stakeholders some context for the presentation.
Meeting structure
Once you have a sense of the purpose of your meeting, you can decide upon an agenda. Competitive analyses are the kind of story that can be hard to tell because there are two main dimensions—the characters and the moral. There are pros and cons to each. Focus too much on the competitors, and the main message (the moral) is lost. Spend too much time on the conclusions, and your stakeholders might wonder whether you’re just pushing your own agenda. Still, the meeting structure needs a spine, a central focus to keep conversation moving in the right direction, and this can be either one of these dimensions.
Competitor-driven story
It may seem counterintuitive, but since the competitors will form the basic structure of the meeting, you should actually start with an account of the criteria. Provide an overview of the criteria at the top of the meeting to set the stage and then dig into each competitor more specifically. Describe how each competitor measured up in each aspect.
This approach works well for laying the landscape and for addressing broader issues, like how each site serves the needs of its target audience. By taking the stakeholders on a tour of the competition, you give them a sense of what they’re up against. This walking-tour approach helps answer broad strategic questions, such as which features are available on the site, what appears most prominently on the home page, and how the site prioritizes content, but not specific design issues, such as comparing the treatment of “add to cart” buttons.
Though a competitor-driven approach is best for discussing larger strategic issues, it can also work well for specific design problems. If you’re looking at just one aspect of the design, your meeting can show how the particular design problem was solved for each competitor. When discussing a specific design problem, your meeting can end with the conclusions, drawing together lessons learned from all the competitors.
Moral-driven story
Instead of structuring your presentation in terms of the competitors and walking through all the issues for each competitor separately, this approach takes the opposite tack: For each issue, you talk about how each competitor stacks up against the others. To set the stage, provide a short overview of the competitors. You don’t need to get into comparing them at this point, but instead describe why they were included in the study.
The presentation then focuses on your conclusions. For each conclusion, you’ll first need to describe the criteria you looked at to arrive at the conclusion—in other words, what you analyzed on each site.
For example, you might conclude that the highest level navigation categories on a pet-related web site are usually pet-type, but that this isn’t the only system of categorization used on the site. To support this conclusion, you looked at three different criteria: the navigation categories on the home page, the metadata attached to products in the catalog and other content, and the structure of intermediate “gallery” pages (galleries are lists of products or content that appear on the user’s path between the home page and the product or content page). Finally, within each of these criteria, you make observations about each of the competitors. This structure is useful for both high-level strategy analyses and specific design problems: The content of the conclusions may be different, but the logic behind them is essentially the same. In this approach, the criteria do not disappear, but become a bridge between your conclusions and your observations.
Presentation risks
When presenting a competitive analysis, you might run into a few snags. You may have moments when the conversation is either derailed—a stakeholder brings up an issue that calls the methodology or the results into question—or gets way off topic. Here are a couple of ways your presentation might spin out of control, and how to reel it back in.
Maintain perspective
The worst way for a meeting to get off topic is to get too caught up in the competition. Although you’ve invited people to the meeting to discuss your site’s competitors, it can be easy to lose perspective on the purpose of the competitive analysis. Symptoms of this problem include getting stuck on one particular design element in a meeting about strategy, or spending too much time talking about one competitor over others. Even though your competitive analysis is meant to address one particular design problem, you might find conversation straying from that design problem into other areas of the site, or your participants might start talking about more strategic issues.
If the conversation is productive, you may not see this as a risk at all. However, if you have a specific agenda and certain goals for the meeting, these kinds of digressions may not be productive regardless of how interesting they are. To get back on track, jump in and remind the participants of the purpose of the meeting. One way to help stop this problem before it happens is to write the purpose of the meeting on a whiteboard or flipchart at the very beginning. If someone attempts to stray too far, you can always point to the meeting purpose and look very stern. You won’t be popular, but you’ll be respected for running a good meeting.
Know the rationale behind your methods
As you present the results of your competitive analysis, you may run into troublesome meeting participants who question your methodology. They may raise questions about your selection of competitors or criteria, or your technique for capturing data.
There is only one surefire way to address this risk: Don’t invite these people to the meeting. But, if that’s unavoidable (and it usually is), the second best way to address the problem is preparation. Methodological questions are easy to anticipate, and if you think about your rationale before going into the meeting, you can usually quash these hecklers. (OK, maybe they have legitimate concerns, but you don’t have to like it.)
Say you’re building this pet web site, for example, and your analysis looked at a handful of sites. That might not stop one of your participants from saying, “I do all my online shopping at JeffersPet.com. Why isn’t that in your competitive analysis?” If you’ve done your homework, you can respond with “Given the time constraints on the competitive analysis, we had to keep the number of sites down to four. We included DrsFosterSmith.com among our reviewed sites to represent the non-retail-store competitors. If, after our presentation, you think there are some aspects represented in JeffersPet.com that we missed, let’s talk about it offline.” Ah, the offline discussion, the Internet consultant’s secret weapon.
Open your mind to varying interpretations
It’s one thing for meeting participants to question the number of competitors or your method for scoring, quite another for them to poke holes in your analysis. Questioning your conclusions is a scarier risk than questioning the methodology, but in reality you may be less married to your conclusions.
In other words, once you’ve done the research for your competitive analysis, a serious concern in your methodology might mean throwing out the entire analysis and starting again. Questioning a conclusion, on the other hand, means revisiting the data for a different interpretation. If you’re convinced of your conclusions, be prepared to defend them vehemently. If you’re open to discussion about what the data mean, try spreading out the data and soliciting alternative interpretations. This could lead to worthwhile discussion.
Unfortunately, the only way to mitigate this risk may be to revisit the raw data. If you can rationalize your conclusion, you may not need extensive discussion (which would derail the meeting), but if you try to simply quash the criticism of your conclusions, your clients may start to question your integrity as a consultant. A vehement defense of ideas is one thing, but outright defensiveness is another. The bottom line is that you need to go into these meetings with the mental and emotional preparation to both unpack your conclusions and to go back to the raw data and observations if necessary.
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/competitive_analysis_part_2/