Competitive journey mapping
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How to combine journey mapping with competitive analysis to identify opportunities to improve your product.
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Competitive journey mapping
- 1. © 2017 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential. Mapping the Competitive Landscape Valentina Ferrari | UX Designer
- 2. What is competitive analysis? Analysis of what currently exists, its strengths and weaknesses, to identify opportunities to innovate.
- 3. Tablestakes vs. Innovation • Innovation: Know what exists, but focus on big picture • Tablestakes: Don’t reinvent the wheel, improve what’s there
- 4. Competitive Analysis • Feature Matrix • Best practices list
- 5. Feature Matrix DIMENSIONS Custom URL Ecommerce Templates ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 70 1000s 100s N/A
- 6. Best Practices list Best Practice: Categorized Templates
- 7. Focus on problem vs. solution
- 8. Journey Mapping PLAN PRODUCE OPTIMIZE & REPORT CLIENT MEDIA CAMPAIGN MANAGEMEN T DESIGN AD OPS ANALYTICS Project Brief Objectives & Strategy Media Plan Campaign Setup Creative Brief Design Concept Ad Production Check-in & Optimization Test & Review FinalMid Traffic
- 9. Competitive Analysis + Journey Mapping Competitive Journey Mapping =
- 10. Competitive Journey Mapping STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5 Competitor 1 Competitor 2 Our Product
- 11. Goals of Competitive Journey Mapping 1. Identify opportunities to innovate 2. Understand what's tablestakes 3. Communicate with stakeholders and execs
- 12. Competitive Analysis for UX Practitioners
- 13. STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5 Select Competitors Research Journey Map Identify Opportunities Communicate Five Steps of Competitive Journey Mapping
- 14. Who’s a competitor? What are the tools/solutions that your target audience uses to solve the problem you’re trying to solve? STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate
- 15. Two Categories • Leaders • Innovators STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate
- 16. Where to find them STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate
- 17. Research Topics • Business • User experience STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate
- 18. Business • Who's their target audience? • What's their key value prop? • What's their pricing structure? STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate
- 19. User Experience • What's their process? • What do they do well? • What could be improved? STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate
- 20. STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate SHORT TIME LONG TIME Walkthroug h Unmoderated Study Interview s Diary Research Methods
- 21. STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate “Finding a free template that looked pretty was challenging. It was like treading through an ocean. You know the pretty fish are underneath you just can't see them because they're too far down.”- Erica, Participant
- 22. Journey Map STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5
- 23. STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate Journey Map Competitor 1 Competitor 2 Our Product STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5
- 24. Opportunity Areas STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 CommunicateCompetitor 1 Competitor 2 Our Product STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5
- 25. All products underperforming STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 CommunicateCompetitor 1 Competitor 2 Our Product OPPORTUNITY AREAS STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5
- 26. All products doing well STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 CommunicateCompetitor 1 Competitor 2 Our Product TABLESTAKES STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5
- 27. Product in market STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 CommunicateCompetitor 1 Competitor 2 Our Product STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5
- 28. Prioritize Opportunities • Company’s goals • Unfair advantage • Competitor advantage STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate
- 29. STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate Communicate • 1 - 2 key takeaways • Simplify visualization around takeaways
- 30. 1. Comparing Existing Product STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5 [Explanation] [Explanation]
- 31. TABLESTAKESOPPORTUNITY AREA 2. Opportunity vs Tablestakes STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate Using an Average line STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5
- 32. STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5 Select Competitors Research Journey Map Identify Opportunities Communicate Five Steps of Competitive Journey Mapping
- 33. Kinds of projects • Brand new products • Existing products • Multi-step features
- 34. Competitive Journey Mapping Innovation Area Sketches Research Design Sprint Tablestakes Best Practices Feature Matrix
- 36. STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate Possible variations • Multiple journey maps per persona • More quantitative measurements of satisfaction (net promoter score?)
- 37. Twitter: @uxvale LinkedIn: Valentina Ferrari
- 38. “Innovation is adding value where it didn't exist before” - Jared Spool
- 39. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Challengers Leaders Niche Visionaries COMPLETENESS OF VISION ABILITYTOEXECUTE STEP 1 Select STEP 2 Research STEP 3 Map STEP 4 Identify STEP 5 Communicate
Editor's Notes
- Hi! Thank you so much for coming to my talk today, my name is Valentina Ferrari and I’m a UX designer at Adobe working on web design products.
- Competitive analysis looks at what currently exists in the market, their strengths and weaknesses to identify opportunities to innovate.
- Now one of the concerns with competitive analysis is that it might influence you, consciously or subconsciously, to simply replicate what your competitor is doing. The key is identifying situations where leveraging what your competitors have done before makes sense and is advantageous, and others where it's not. In areas where you're looking to innovate, you want to know what they've done, but keep an open mind that is focused on the problem rather than the solution. When it comes to table-stakes, on the other hand, taking a closer look at what competitors have done and making marginal improvements can help speed the process along and allow you to focus your resources towards the riskier, high-innovation areas.
- There's many ways to do competitive analysis A lot of these methods come from the business world and have been adapted to UX. Feature Matrix Identifying best practices
- How many of you have used a feature matrix before? A feature matrix looks at whether different competitors have a list of features that you are considering. For example, here you can see all of our competitors offer custom URLS and e-commerce functionality. And they offer a varying number of templates, from none at all to thousands. But is it better to have tons of templates or just have a few? Feature Matrices only tells you what your competitors are doing, not what YOU should be doing.
- Another type of competitive analysis are best practices lists. They’re more UX focused than Feature Matrices. They explain and show examples of the things your competitors are doing well, what you might want to learn from or emulate. This is also great if you're looking at similar apps in other domains, so for example if you're looking at setup flows for a website you could look at other setup flows in different industries such as shoes or jewelry. However, it doesn’t tell you anything about where the opportunities are to differentiate your product from the competition.
- Really the downsides with both the Feature Matrix and Best Practices list is that they're very focused on solution rather than the problem. They can tell you what the competitors are already doing, not what YOU should be doing. In fact, if you present one of these to your stakeholders, I am willing to bet they’re going to suggest that you just follow the best practices, just add more templates. So they're not a great way of identifying opportunity areas and creating space for a design team to explore it and innovate.
- A customer journey map tells the story of the customer’s experience, through all the touchpoints, all the different people involved in the process. The example here shows the lifecycle of an ad campaign. You can see all the different teams that are involved to make a campaign come to life, from the client working with the agencies, to the designers, media team, ad ops, analytics… And a Journey Map allows you to see the process and dependencies between them. And it layers that information with the user’s satisfaction, looking at which points of the process is the user happiest and at which points is he most frustrated? Looking at those areas where he’s most frustrated is a great way to identify opportunities to improve the product. By itself, however, it doesn’t provide any information about what the rest of the industry is doing and how you stack up against your competitors.
- Competitive Journey Mapping brings together the power of competitive analysis to evaluate what currently exists in the market, with journey mapping’s focus on the user’s experience throughout the end-to-end workflow.
- Competitive journey mapping looks at how the flow, and in particular the satisfaction lines, vary among your product (if you have one in market) and competitors. So rather than just looking at your own product’s satisfaction line you also map your competitor’s and look for patterns across the industry. This allows you to identify: Opportunity areas where your competitors are not fulfilling or exceeding the user's expectations What are competitors are already doing well and you might need to consider table stakes or best practices
- The goals of competitive analysis are to Identify opportunity areas where you want to invest the most time in Understand what's table stakes so you can limit the amount of time you spend on this area Leverage it to communicate with executives to get buy in
- Traditionally competitive analysis has been done by the business folks in the organization. But Competitive Journey Mapping is a great technique for UX practitioners because it’s rooted in the user experience of the products, and really leverages our understanding of end-to-end workflows and empathy for our users. And at the same time it communicates very easily and effectively to the business folks.
- Today I'm going to walk you through the 5 steps you need to take to create an competitive journey map and use it to communicate with your executives. The five steps are: The 5 steps are: Identify key competitors Study their business model and user experience Create a journey map Identify opportunity areas Communicate to execs Now I'll go through each of them one by one and then walk you through two case studies that show how you can put this into practice. And then finally we'll break into small groups so you can practice going through the steps together.
- To identify a competitor, look at what tools or solutions are your users using to solve the problem that YOU’re trying to solve.
- There are a lot of different ways to segment competitors. For the purpose of this analysis I think you can simplify it down to two categories: the leaders in the space - the well known companies, and the innovators. Well known companies - these are the ones most people are familiar with and the ones your executives are likely asking you about. The innovators - a lot of these are scrappy little startups. Pushing the boundaries.
- Where to find them Select 3-10 How to select them if many Look at Leaders Press & Capital Interesting or similar model The first step is to find them. You probably already know who the Leaders are in your industry. The innovators are a little bit more tricky but you can look at tech blogs or startup listings like Product Hunt. You want to identify somewhere between 3-10 competitors, more than that and you'll probably start noticing similar patterns and you won't have time to go as in-depth with each one. What if like in our case there are a ton of different competitors? How do you know which ones to choose? Make sure you have the leaders covered, because these are the ones that will come up in conversation most often so you want to make sure you have a good grasp of them. Chances are there’s only a handful of leading companies. Where it really explodes is the number of innovators. Some criteria to look at are which ones have really generated a lot of press in recent months or have raised a lot of capital. Another way is to see which ones at first glance are doing really interesting work or have a model similar to the one you're considering.
- Now that we have our list of competitors it's time to take a close look at them. There's two types of questions to ask as you look at them.
- The questions How to get the answers Who's their target audience - you want to know are they targeting the same audience as you because that might have an impact on how their user flows compare to yours. What's their key value prop? What do they say they do best? What's their pricing structure? What features do they charge for? The primary way to get this information is by looking on their website and marketing materials.
- And then there's the UX questions What's their process/flow like? And within that flow, what do they do well? What could be improved? This is really the crux of our journey map.
- As I mentioned, for the business questions you can look at your competitor’s website or marketing materials. For the UX questions you can use a variety of research methods based on your time and other projects you might be working on. If you're short on time then even just you putting yourself in the mindset of users based on what you know and going through the flows will give you a pretty good idea and make you more familiar with them. If you have a little more time, or as maybe part of other research you're doing, you might do some interviews or some usability testing. These will help add richness and depth to your data.
- For example, this is my favorite quote from interviews I did with Wordpress users - “Finding a free template that looked pretty was challenging. It was like treading through an ocean. You know the pretty fish are underneath you just can't see them because they're too far down.” - That kind of a quote you can only get through interviews!
- List all the steps involved in the process of using your competitor’s product. 10,000 ft view Abstraction - move away from specific features —- So we identified our competitors and we looked at their business model and their user experience - the flows their users follow, what works well, what could be improved. Now that we have all that information it's time to create the journey map. To begin you want to list out all the high level steps the user is taking in the process of using your competitor's product. This should be a 10,000 foot (or meter!) view. [pause] This abstraction is very important because it helps you move away from specific features that your competitors might have to really focus problem areas that need solving. And that can be solved in a variety of different ways.
- How to add the satisfaction line What is the usability line? — The next step is to add the satisfaction line for each competitor. The satisfaction line goes from extreme frustration to extreme delight, where the middle is basic usability. This is where you want to reference the research you did earlier around what worked well and what didn’t work well in the competitor’s system. If your participants complained about something then it falls beneath the usability line, then you can judge the severity of the issue - were they unable to complete the task? Or was it more of a minor annoyance? If they commented positively about something then it falls above the usability line - this is looking at delight. Did they comment that’s something is nice? Or were they raving about it, saying it has completely changed their lives? Use your best judgement. If they didn’t say anything at all, then it’s probably close to the middle - the usability line. If you already have a product in market, this is a great time to add your line as well so you can better evaluate how you compare.
- So we have analyzed the competitors, we have mapped them on a journey map. The next step is to look at our journey maps to identify the opportunity areas. To do that, look at where the lines are clustering on the map.
- Are there areas where all the products are underperforming? These are the spots most or all of the satisfaction lines are low. These are great areas to innovate in.
- Are there areas where all the products are doing really well? These should be considered table-stakes. If your product is significantly worse than the rest here, it might lead to trouble.
- If you have a product in market and you mapped it, how does it compare to the other lines? Are there areas you're stronger in than the competitors? And conversely are there areas your product is weaker than the rest?
- So you now have a list of opportunity areas that you need to prioritize. There are a lot of factors that go into whether you prioritize one area over another, from design and engineering resources to timelines. These are a few other factors that you should consider beyond that. You might find that there are multiple opportunity areas. So at that point you need to figure out how to prioritize them. So there's a few things you can look for here: How does each of the opportunities tie in to the company's goals? For example, if your team is really focused on getting more return usage, are there features you could add that would encourage that? Are there opportunities where your company as an unfair advantage over its competition? Conversely, are there areas where it'd be really easy for your competitors to innovate in without a lot of effort? Maybe those should be lower priority for you. Or if your product is trying to start earning revenue, are there areas that your competitors are monetizing?
- Step 5: Communicate to Stakeholders So now we have looked at our competitors, we have identified key areas we need to focus on to innovate. Now it's time to communicate this to our stakeholders and executives to get their buy in so they give us the time, space, and resources to do design. The key here is figuring out what is the key takeaway you want to communicate and simplify the visualization to focus on that. Your key takeaway might be the 1 or 2 areas you think your company should improve in. Or if you're just starting to explore this market, it might be to advise your executive about which areas should be considered table stakes and which ones you actually need to innovate in.
- So we looked at a high-level steps involved in creating a competitive journey map.
- So what kinds of projects can you apply this to? Brand new products Existing products that are going through a significant redesign Large feature areas with multi-step user flows Next, I will walk you through two case studies. The first one looks at how you can apply it to an end-to-end flow for an existing product. The second one, looks at how you can apply it to a single part of the flow for a brand new product.
- Now, over time what you once identified as delighters will become the new normal as it becomes more and more part of user's expectations. And on top of that the tech industry changes so quickly! So this is an exercise that needs to be repeated every few months, depending on what you work on, probably at least once a year. Source of idea: Jared Spool’s talk on the Kano model
- Summary The case studies show a few variations of how you can apply this process. Features within a product as well as full product experiences Existing product vs. a new product
- Thank you so much for coming to my talk. If you try this out or have questions feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
- [Appendix 1: Jared Spool’s definition of innovation] Source: video of Jared Spool talking about the Kano model
- [Appendix 2: Gartner’s Magic Quadrant] The first step is identifying the competitors. If you're someone who reads business books you know there's a ton of different ways to segment your competition. This is a particularly common one: Challengers, Niche Players, Leaders, and Visionaries.