A competitive audit involves a structured way to evaluate competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and design choices, and can be quick, planned or thorough.
Tools like UXtweak offer competitive usability testing with features like preference tests, 5-second tests, tree testing, and first-click tests.
A Competitive Audit is more concerned with deeper product and user experience issues and examines all aspects of an experience such as user flows, interface design, layout, microcopy, forms of content, and can be assessed in the audit.
It is important as a structured and reliable way of checking competitors and offers the opportunity to save time with existing solutions - assessing concepts before investing time in prototypes or testing.
By exploring competitors’ products, a competitive audit helps uncover pain points, successful design patterns, and opportunities to improve your own and builds better empathy.
Conducting an audit with a bit of planning, anyone with time can conduct a competitive audit using tools like UXtweak’s competitive testing tool.
The process is easy, accessible, and budget-friendly and is perfect when time or resources are limited.
The audience for such audits ranges from high-level executives like the CEO, CTO, or other C-suite members to product team members like researchers, designers, managers, and engineers.
A competitive audit requires avoiding biases, trying to answer everything at once, outright copying, blindly following the crowd, obsessing over features, skipping other research, and relying on it as the only source of ideas.
By following through the process of planning the audit, identifying competitors, conducting analysis, summarizing and sharing action points, and choosing the right competitor audit, conducting a competitive audit would help you mimic competitors' strengths and learn from their mistakes.