In order to better understand my client’s position in the retail market and learn how their online presence compares to key competitors, I have carried out a competitive audit. My intention is that a competitive audit will inform some of the upcoming design decisions in a redesign of the Blossom & Easel website. I will also highlight any potential usability problems in competitors’ websites and review gaps in the market where there is opportunity to innovate. Overall, this process aims to improve the efficiency of the forthcoming design process by maximising the return on time, money and energy (Google, n.d.).
During the previous module I produced a research proposal that are listed for large-scale competitors of blossom and easel, these were Sainsbury’s, next, John Lewis, and ASOS. In addition to these Christopher Johnson has informed me of a further three competitors that are similar in size to Blossom & Easel.
All of the competitors analysed are in direct competition for a very similar audience. I have been able to analyse each competitors strengths and weaknesses regarding their online presence, including aspects such as: accessibility, user flow and navigation (across a product page), media (e.g.: product images and video), and tone/descriptiveness of written product descriptions.
All visuals that were inspected for the competitive audit, as well as the outcomes, have been presented as a Keynote presentation document here:
I have compiled the data from the competitive audit into a Microsoft Excel document, which is available here:
Summary
To summarise the competitive audit, it appears that the inclusion of emerging media could be a unique opportunity to aid high–NFT consumers’ confidence, allowing Blossom & Easel to increase the endowment effect among their customers in a manner that their competitors do not currently achieve. However any experience must address salient qualities of the product (Peck, Barger and Webb, 2013); some similarly priced competitors demonstrate product capacity in their imagery, providing consumers with confidence by alluding to scale and build quality using methods that Blossom & Easel currently do not.
I’m very much looking forward to presenting this data to the client at a meeting next week.
References
Google (n.d.). Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate: Week 5 – Competitive Audits. [online] Coursera. Available at: https://www.coursera.org/learn/start-ux-design-process/home/ [Accessed 28 Jun. 2022].
Peck, J., Barger, V.A. and Webb, A. (2013). In Search of a Surrogate for touch: the Effect of Haptic Imagery on Perceived Ownership. Journal of Consumer Psychology, [online] 23(2), pp.189–196. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2012.09.001.