Supercharge your products with a competitive audit
It only takes an hour to find inspiration and avoid obvious solutions.
A spreadsheet might not be as sexy as a Post-it note party, but a competitive audit (sometimes called a competitor audit) is an efficient and effective form of design research. You can find solid inspiration for a straightforward UX problem in about an hour and tame a thornier challenge in less than a day.
What exactly is a competitive audit? It’s a step-by-step look at how other companies use elements such as nomenclature, UI strings, UX flows, and content components. By looking at how direct and indirect competitors have (or haven’t) solved a similar problem, you can:
- Avoid using a first-draft solution
- Find established design patterns
- Uncover existing mental models
- Learn from the triumphs (and mistakes) of others
- Eliminate nerdview (using company slang externally)
- Gather valuable UX insights quickly
Because an audit can be conducted by anyone on your team, it offers a more collaborative approach to design research. Here are 3 audits we like to use at Shopify, along with tips on formatting and how to find indirect competitors.
Audit #1: Take it to a higher level
When you want to see how different content components are combined to create a cohesive page experience, a high-level content audit is your best bet. This includes both the position and amount of text, videos, images, banners, buttons (calls-to-action), fields, logos, and links. The goal is to determine:
- Visual and positional prominence
- Content purpose (conversion, trust, educational, etc.)
- Content and design patterns
- Rationale for grouping distinct elements together
- Ratio of content types
- Content order shifts due to responsive breakpoints
To better understand what’s involved in a high-level content audit, spend 15 minutes on this sample exercise:
This audit is great if you need to:
- Decide on content hierarchy
- Find the right balance of content types and content volume
- Identify relevant, required, missing, and nice-to-have content
- Determine content choreography for responsive design
Audit #2: Mind your language
When you want to figure out naming conventions for UI strings, a terminology audit is your weapon of choice. The goal is to isolate:
- Internal vs. external speak
- Tech jargon vs. plain language
- Objects and naming
- Nouns and product names
- Pronouns (we, us, first person, third person)
To better understand what’s involved in a terminology audit, spend 15 minutes on this sample exercise:
This audit is great if you need to:
- Establish the industry standard for language
- Determine if customers will understand your jargon
- Build a language or naming system
Audit #3: Go with the UX flow
When you want to identify the steps required to complete a task, and the content and design cues needed across that flow, a UX flow audit is what you want. The goal is to determine:
- Number of steps
- Pace of information
- Complexity of a process, such as onboarding or account creation
- Type of mental model(s) used
- Clarity of calls-to-action and other UI elements
- Ease and effectiveness of navigation
- Patterns for modals, empty states, and progressive disclosure
To better understand what’s involved in a UX flow audit, spend 15 minutes on this sample exercise:
This audit is great if you need to:
- Find friction points in an existing flow
- Understand how a user task is framed
- Balance required vs. optional elements
Indirect competitors are your friends
If you need more proof that competitive audits are kind of a big deal, check out Jaime Levy’s recent book UX Strategy. (Spoiler alert: she devotes 40 pages to them.) Levy is particularly sharp on the importance of indirect competitors:
“The reality is that people often use products or combinations of products in ways that the product makers do not expect. … Research everything because that is how you and your team will ensure that you have an edge over others in your industry.”
Finding indirect competitors often involves going into empty rabbit holes. While this can be frustrating, the reward for lateral thinking is competitive advantage. As Jake Knapp and crew note in Sprint:
“Printed on the wrapper of every Tcho bar is a simple flavour wheel with just six words: Bright, Fruity, Floral, Earthy, Nutty, and Chocolatey. When Blue Bottle looked at that wheel, they got inspired, and when we sketched, someone repurposed the idea as a simple flavour vocabulary for describing Blue Bottle’s coffee beans.”
Indirect competitors not only spark better products but they also help avoid bias. It’s easy to start a competitive audit with the unconscious goal of proving your initial hunches or tentative solutions correct. A hypothesis is fine, but the goal of an audit is to collect data, insights, and research — not validate your instincts.
While a combination of direct and indirect competitors will solve your immediate challenges, it’s also worth considering the problem space itself. As Indi Young and Kunyi Mangalam explain in a 2018 Interactions article, problem space research isn’t connected to a particular user type or solution. It’s about “a deep understanding of the way people think their way toward a purpose.” Ongoing problem space research generates more robust mental models, and “the aggregate patterns from the problem space inform and inspire idea generation, strategy decisions [and] design direction.”
Find the right format
While there isn’t an official method for formatting an audit, a useful starting point is to consider who will view the end result. What format will allow teammates or stakeholders to best understand your themes and takeaways? Will the audit serve as a standalone design artifact or a key input for a workshop? Answering these questions will help determine what to highlight, and whether you’ll need supporting context.
For a more granular look at formatting an audit, check out Airtable’s guide to running a competitor analysis. Levy includes a how-to guide for creating a competitive analysis findings brief in UX Strategy. To see a competitive audit disguised as a lively article, check out Paul Ford’s assessment of 33 charity sites. Or maybe you want a content-focused competitive analysis. And for hilarious and insightful annotations of UX flows, check out User Onboarding teardowns.
Audits can’t do everything
While obvious, it’s worth pointing out that 10 problems can’t be solved with 1 audit. A competitive audit isn’t a substitute for user interviews or other types of qualitative UX research. It shouldn’t serve as the only source of rationale for content, design, and UX decisions. And it isn’t a brainstorming tool, although it can serve as an input. As with any other type of design research, define your problem clearly before you select the best tool(s) to solve it.
But if you want a quick way to ensure that your products and features will solve the right problems in the best way possible, then get started on that audit.
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This article is based on a workshop co-developed with Nicola Evans. Her invaluable insights appear throughout. Extra thanks to Alexandra Hunter for her careful edits.
