Tips for Usability Professionals in a Down Economy
Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2009, pp. 60-69
Article Contents
Tip #7: Keep Tabs on Competitors
Just as important as keeping up on technology is keeping tabs on your competitors. I don't mean spying on them, but making use of publicly available information. Your competitors operate in the same space that your company does, which means that you can learn from them—from their mistakes as well as their successes. In my job, our direct competitors are other financial services companies. But we have indirect competitors too, such as banks, credit unions, and insurance companies. Finally, anyone operating on the Web is at some level competing with the big guys: Amazon, NetFlix, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Flickr, etc.
Keeping tabs on your competitors may be easier than you think. The following are some of the techniques that you might want to consider:
- Industry reports. Several organizations publish regular reports analyzing Websites in various areas, including usability and customer satisfaction (e.g., Forrester Research, http://www.forrester.com). Although some of these reports can be rather expensive, check to see if your company has a subscription that provides access to the reports. And some reports are free. For example, Foresee Results (www.foreseeresults.com) freely publishes the results of their customer satisfaction surveys of Websites (using the American Customer Satisfaction Index, or ACSI, methodology). They issue a quarterly update of information about customer satisfaction with U.S. government Websites, and annual reports for eCommerce and online retail Websites.
- News alerts. It's amazingly easy (and free) to keep tabs on key competitors using news alerts. These can be set up on major news sites and aggregators, including Google (http://www.google.com/alerts/) and Yahoo (http://alerts.yahoo.com/). Just choose the keywords you want to use and news articles matching those keywords will be emailed to you regularly. You can also use this technique to keep up on the usability field, but be aware that a keyword as general as usability will result in lots of articles.
- Conferences. Local and national conferences or meetings can be a good opportunity to learn about your competitors. This is true for usability conferences like UPA, but also for conferences specific to your industry. Most of us are justifiably proud of the work we do and like to present it to our colleagues when we can. And the opportunities for informal interaction can be invaluable.
- Competitors' Websites. It's rather obvious that you can learn from what your competitors are doing by watching their Websites. Some usability teams carry this a step further and do regular usability studies of their major competitors' Websites in comparison to their own. In most cases it's possible to design a competitive usability study where users are asked to do exactly the same tasks on each site. With appropriate usability metrics, this is a prime opportunity for getting data that provides clear business value, including directions for future work.