How do you do competitive benchmarking in the right way?

How often has someone approached you asking you to do a competitive benchmark to see how your projects work compared to competitors? I’ve been asked to do so probably too many times in my life. Benchmarking as a research method seems quite attractive, and the results are visual and clear. But I see many junior designers falling into the trap of comparing direct competitors only, which, in my opinion, brings from zero to not too much benefit in most of the cases.?

Why am I saying that?

Let’s talk about when and how you should do competitive benchmarks.

First of all, remember that you, as a UX Designer, do that for the user. You may try to see where your projects stand in the industry, identify patterns and solutions your user may be familiar with, and pick direct competitors, which may not be a good strategy. I’ve fallen into this trap in my career, too — I just listed the most popular and respected competitors and tried to analyze how my product looks compared to them. So why not select your key competitors for benchmarking?

Before picking any product to use in your research, I urge you to ask yourself two questions:

• Is there a specifically good design for the product, or does it solve some unique problem?
• Are your users familiar with this competitor's product or solution?

If you can answer a firm “yes” to at least one of the questions, go with your research. But if you can’t and the only reason you looked at this product is that someone in the team mentioned it as a good, well-known product in the market, think one more time before adding it.

My suggestion here is to consider more wisely what you’re trying to test. You need to make sure that there’s a great design solution addressing specific issues in your product industry, or you need to be sure that the majority of your users are using this competitor’s solution.

But if you identified what you want to test in your product and there’s no other solution from the industry that you consider good, try to find this specific aspect in some other product. Maybe this pattern or flow you’re testing exists in some music player, shopping, or navigation app. Be creative, do research, find out what your users’ toolkits are, and learn from the best designs, not just from some random solution.