If you’re designing something and are entirely new to a field, conducting a shortened competitive analysis is one of the best ways to find your footing.

Competitive analyses tend to be a little controversial, as you’ll often hear axioms like don’t do a competitive analysis before conducting user research. This is because it’s not only likely to limit your creativity (by analyzing many existing designs). It can be where Marketing and UX Research collide, leading to many headaches (i.e., “Let’s copy Amazon’s design with some changes.”)

However, it’s also one of the quickest ways to find your footing in a new field, along with understanding what your product’s UX innovations could be. Furthermore, you don’t even need to conduct a complete competitive analysis to gain these benefits: all you need to do is ask yourself three questions.

I learned this when I found myself working in a new domain: B2B Healthcare Technology websites.

Finding footing in a new field

When I started my first B2B website re-design, I had almost no experience with the field. The world of Business-to-Business (B2B) websites had many different priorities, user groups, and workflows than I was used to, which meant that I needed to find my bearings first before designing anything.

This is where competitive analysis can play its’ most significant role. Jaime Levy, in her book UX Strategy, defines her UX strategy framework based on four tenets:

Each of these four tenets plays a role in making sure that you’re designing a product that has provides some value that people genuinely want. However, I’ll focus on the one tenet here is “Value Innovation.”

Good UX Design doesn’t just make things easy to use: it helps users accomplish their goals. For users to be invested in accomplishing those goals, your website has to provide value to them.

This is where trying to understand the “value proposition” of your website, along with your competitor’s, can be helpful. A value proposition is a concise statement summarizing the unique benefits customers can expect from your product or service.

For example, “Airbnb is an online community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book accommodations around the world.”

When starting a new project, you may not know how you’d define your website’s value proposition. Uncovering this may require a lot of stakeholder conversations and interviews to understand the full context.

This is where looking at your competitors can provide many essential insights. While competitive analyses often involve doing a lot of analyses, like SWOT analysis, analyzing traffic, and more, it doesn’t always have to be that complicated.

Asking three quick questions about other companies based on their public websites can jumpstart your understanding of a domain:

1. Who are your competitors?
2. What is their value proposition?
3. What are common things that competitors do to convey their value proposition?

Competitive analyses are a crash course in learning a field

Learning about your competitors is an excellent way of understanding the field as a whole. Pretty much everything has been attempted, so understanding what worked or failed with individuals and companies is crucial to understanding your competitive advantage.

Understanding your competitors can come from several different places:

• Users may talk about products they’re using in customer discovery and other places
• Stakeholder interviews may drop names of competitive products they’re aware of
• Keyword searches of your value proposition in Google might yield results

As a result, to know your competition may require significant amounts of user research: UX best practices would recommend that you look at 5–10 Direct and Indirect competitors.

However, you don’t necessarily need to do this in the abbreviated competitive analysis. All you’re trying to do there is answer one question:

“Is this a competitor that’s relevant to my field (and my company’s value proposition)?”

If this seems like the case, this is where the third question comes into play:

• What are common things that competitors do to convey their value proposition?

We’re not trying to understand everything about our competitors: instead, we want to understand common design elements across the field.

These may include:

• The tone and copy of the competitor
• Good and bad features
• Call-to-Actions (CTA)
• User reviews or feedback
• Case studies or testimonials
• Wait/load times
• Customer service
• Other design elements

These are things that you can discover right away by looking at competitors’ sites, while it may take you a while to uncover them through user research.

It’s not that these are hidden insights: it’s the opposite. Some of these things are so obvious (to your stakeholders) that they might forget to mention them to you.

Here are some things I learned immediately by looking at other B2B Healthtech websites:

• Social proof is essential: Businesses may be spending thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars on B2B or Enterprise solutions. By displaying logos or certifications, knowing that they’re not the first company to do so helps your users make that purchase.

• Emphasizing doctors being involved in the product matters:Healthcare is already an intricate and complex system to navigate: your users don’t want the additional challenge of defining everything for you. Of course, an outsider’s perspective is sometimes valuable, but few things are as compelling as a product made by people who understand the environment.

• A good photo is often crucial in establishing a good first impression: Photos and animations are often at the center stage of healthcare websites, so choosing a photo that accurately represents your product or service is a crucial step.

Your users have likely built up mental models based on other related sites they have visited. While you can still ideate to create a unique and compelling website, you should ensure that your website includes design elements crucial to your domain.

UX is a competitive advantage

While we often don’t think of it this way, thousands of case studies show that good UX is often a competitive advantage. Multiple businesses may have similar value propositions, which often means that good UX is one of the few ways to differentiate themselves.

This is why it can be essential to examine your competitors to see the design elements they’ve deemed most important. By doing so, you can take a step back and see how they’ve chosen to design something public-facing to express their value proposition.

Doing so can not only jumpstart your knowledge of a new field: if you’re alone in a field with poor UX Design, it can provide a basis for turning UX into your primary competitive advantage.

Kai Wong is a Senior UX Designer, Design Writer, and Data Visualization advocate. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.