97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 56. Don’t Perform a Competitive Analysis Before Ideating

William Ntim

The practice of performing competitive analysis before putting your ideas to paper, ideating, or concepting will create cognitive bias during your creative process. We’re often quick to check what competitors are doing as soon as we are presented with a problem statement, but this may be a creativity-limiting step.

Starting your design project with a competitive analysis can anchor your creativity, and copying a competitor is not an effective way to lead the herd. This can cause poor UX to proliferate if ineffective UX is repeated and becomes the norm. You probably have heard this before: “Amazon does it this way,” “Airbnb does it this way,” and so on. The key part people forget is that Amazon and Airbnb created their designs for a specific reason. Lots of research went into arriving at their current experience. Companies may have similar audiences, but placing your user at the center of your design decisions is how you meet your user’s needs. The other reality is that these “competitors” are already six months ahead with whatever feature you’re looking to copy, and it will probably be another six months before your team is ready to roll out said feature. By that time, the competitors are probably going to be rolling out another new feature. Yes, this is the cycle, and it can continue indefinitely if ...