Competitive Usability Testing

Many of our customers like to get a clear picture of how their website compares to their competitors. To do this we design and run a competitive usability test. We have target market users perform similar tasks on the competing sites and gather task completion, task timing, and user satisfaction data. What emerges is a pretty clear picture of where a site is strong versus its competition and where it needs to improve. Our customer now knows where they stand overall, has a list of functions they know they need to work on, and always gets some good ideas for site enhancements.

Here are some examples of neat things we learned from some competitive testing we have run recently.

• A personal finance product learned that their new checkbook register design that featured mouse-over highlights that showed users exactly what was clickable and what was not was very effective versus their competitor.
• A real estate site learned that their product locator, which required users to select the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, was rated considerable lower than their competitors that only required users to enter a price range and allowed them to specify “any” for the number of bedrooms and baths.
• An apparel site discovered that their search mechanism was soundly beaten by their competitors, which allowed users to specify search criteria for brand, size, price, color, and style.

Competitive testing is a great way to keep abreast of what’s working and what’s not working well for Internet users in your space.