Method category: Generative product research

How to Use This in GLIDR

Competitor Usability Testing is conducting usability tests with one or more competitor products to get a better understanding of the product you need to build.

In GLIDR, a Competitor Usability Test can be conducted as Research since you are generating open-ended ideas and observations rather than hitting a specific metric. First, start your Research and connect ideas about your product that your usability test will involve in the competitor's product. Then, you may want to make each usability test its own Evidence - Interview, or you can combine multiple shorter studies into Evidence - Other based on competitor product (depending on how you conduct these). Finally, in the Analyze phase, decide how you will update your project based on what you've learned.

Learn more about each of those aspects of GLIDR:

Article excerpted from The Real Startup Book
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Competitor usability testing is observing our target market use a competitor’s products or services to gain insights on the mindset of the user, common issues, and potential improvements in our own product. In some cases, the need for an entirely new product can be revealed. In other cases, we can gain insights on what parts of a competitor product are unnecessary.

This is almost identical but not to be confused with Competitive usability testing, which tests an existing product against existing competitors to establish which product is “winning.”

See also Usability Testing.

The process of conducting competitor usability tests is the same as when testing our own product. However in this case we apply the same methodology to a different purpose by testing our competitor’s products or substitute goods.

Where usability testing is an evaluative test of our own product and seeks to verify that the product functions sufficiently to deliver the value proposition, competitor usability testing is a generative method intended to create potential ideas for a solution.

For example, to generate ideas on how to create a better U.S. tax experience, we could conduct usability testing on tax preparation in Sweden or India. The results and observations would not tell us whether the U.S. tax experience is good (it is not), but it may give us ideas around whether or not to improve the comprehensibility of the tax code, the tax submission process, the tax rules themselves, etc.

See Usability Testing

See Usability Testing but use a competitor’s products or a substitute good. For maximum idea generation, use different products.

Any results should be taken as generative and not evaluative. In addition, any ideas generated tend to be highly unstructured and piecemeal. So they must be properly integrated in a viable solution.

Before building a solution, any ideas should be tested via alternative generative product research methods such as solutions interviews or concierge testing.