Competitive Benchmarking

Competitive Benchmarking is the strategic process of comparing a product, service, or user experience against direct and indirect competitors to evaluate relative performance, identify strengths and weaknesses, and uncover opportunities for improvement. In UX, it focuses on assessing how your product’s usability, functionality, and overall experience measure up against industry standards and competing offerings.

Expanded Definition

In user experience (UX) and digital product design, Competitive Benchmarking enables organizations to position their product effectively within the competitive landscape. Rather than guessing how a design performs in isolation, benchmarking provides objective, data-driven insights by evaluating comparable products using consistent criteria.

This method helps UX teams understand how competitors are solving similar problems, what users expect from leading products, and where the product under review may be underperforming or excelling. The results guide design enhancements, prioritize features, and justify strategic decisions.

Competitive benchmarking can be both quantitative—using metrics like task success rates, time-on-task, Net Promoter Score (NPS), or error rates—and qualitative, through heuristic evaluations, usability testing, or customer perception analyses.

Key Activities in Competitive Benchmarking

• Identify Competitors
  Determine which brands, platforms, or products offer comparable experiences or target similar user groups.
• Define Goals and Metrics
  Set clear objectives and performance indicators. Common UX benchmarking metrics include satisfaction, efficiency, learnability, and accessibility.
• Collect Comparative Data
  Use analytics, usability testing, heuristic reviews, surveys, or third-party platforms to gather insights from both your product and competitors.
• Analyze and Interpret Findings
  Identify patterns and gaps between your offering and others. Highlight areas of opportunity for enhancement or differentiation.
• Implement Improvements
  Prioritize changes that close competitive gaps and elevate the user experience based on actionable benchmarking data.
• Monitor Progress
  Repeat the benchmarking process over time to measure improvement, validate design decisions, and stay ahead of shifting market expectations.

Benefits of Competitive Benchmarking in UX

• Improves Product Quality
  Benchmarking uncovers usability flaws and helps raise design standards by learning from others’ successes and failures.
• Guides Strategic Design Decisions
  Offers objective data to support decisions around features, layouts, content, or workflows.
• Enhances User Satisfaction
  By aligning with or exceeding competitors’ user experiences, teams can increase engagement and retention.
• Boosts Market Differentiation
  Identifies ways to stand out by providing superior or unique user experiences that competitors don’t offer.
• Supports Innovation
  Encourages teams to rethink and refine offerings by learning from the design trends and performance of others.

Example

A fintech app performs a competitive benchmarking study against three major digital banking apps. Through usability testing and satisfaction surveys, they learn that their onboarding process takes twice as long as competitors’ and results in a lower completion rate. In response, they streamline the onboarding flow, implement progressive disclosure, and retest. Within one quarter, onboarding completion improves by 30%, and overall satisfaction rises.

Competitive Benchmarking vs. Internal Benchmarking

Example Use Case

• A product team compares onboarding flows across competitors to reduce drop-off rates.

• A UX researcher benchmarks checkout flows for e-commerce platforms to uncover UX friction points.

• A SaaS startup uses benchmarking to validate if their dashboard features meet market standards before launch.

Challenges & Limitations

• Limited access to competitor internal data (e.g., real usage metrics).

• Risk of overfocusing on competitors instead of users.

• Benchmarked features may not reflect actual user satisfaction.

Tools & Methods

• Tools: Maze, Hotjar, Google Analytics, UserZoom, Crazy Egg, Lookback

• Methods: Usability testing, heuristic evaluation, SUS score comparison, task analysis, heatmaps

Back to Glossary Index Page