While developing a product or a service it is important to understand your competition and against whom you will be competing. If you design a product without doing proper research then you might miss the insights which you can gain beforehand and save time and effort. Competitor analysis is an important step which can provide you the insights to develop a better product. It is a good practice to check for competitors while working on a new idea. It will also tell you if the product is able to solve the users problems. What you think will sell in the market might not be the case that's why beforehand competitor analysis is important. Competitor analysis include understanding your competitors product in depth, what they are selling, what their customers think about them and what are the flaws in their design which you can fix in your product while designing.

 

To begin with competitor analysis you need to first understand what you want your users to achieve and then use your competitors product many times and try to think how you can improve a particular step or how to reduce number of steps required to complete a task or how to improve layout of this page. Creating a comparison chart is a good practice which will provide you all the insights at a glance. You should find as many competitors you can to compare because everyone will be different having something unique which you can think whether to apply it in your product and will it improve the usability of your product and overall experience of your product. Doing a strengths and weaknesses test will also help in your research and develop a product without the flaws and more advantages which will help to stand out in the market.

 

There are many techniques which you can get on google to carry out competitor analysis. Analysing and summarizing  your research is also an important step which will create a report you can use anytime to show it to your colleagues or clients to clarify their doubts about your design. You should also showcase it in your portfolio because it will show that you are research oriented and tend to understand the problems first before starting to design.