By Karandeep Dhillon and Tamanna Haider for Team Fridge
Competitive analysis is mainly an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current competitors. Competitive analysis helps us identify our competitors, identify gaps in a certain business, and discovers standards across a business to market one’s business more effectively. Competitive analysis can also identify the tactics used by our competitors and what separates each competitor apart.
Heuristic evaluation is also mainly an assessment, but it involves measuring the usability of user interfaces and the product. The evaluators judge the product based on usually 5 to 10 heuristics and give a grade along with a description for each heuristic. Heuristic evaluations allow for an overall review of the usability of a product and discover gaps in the experience of using the application. Heuristic evaluations also help locate usability problems and allow for quick feedback even in the early design stages.
Personas are realistic descriptions of a certain user of a product. Personas provide insight into understanding our user or typical users and help make a product that would be most effective for them. Scenarios describe a particular goal or task a specific user is wanting to accomplish. Scenarios provide insight into how and why a certain user or users would go about completing their goals/tasks using our product.
Competitve Analysis:
Hueristic Evalution:
Personas and Scenarios:
From our methods and findings, we can conclude that our product needs to be minimal in designs and have an effective way to complete the core goals of our product to fit most users needs. We noticed that our biggest competitors have somewhat complex design with numerous amount of tasks and features. These findings recommend that we stick to a minimal design with separate pages for each feature and task. We would also like to give our users more freedom and control over what they would want to do with our app. Something we would include is have a dedicated page for documentation of various parts of the app. We would also want to expand on the information each food item stores since our competitors seem to limit this information to just the expiration date and quantity. We would want to a design something that allows for the ability of caloric and ingredient information as well as categorize our food item. We can also target the revenue area of the product and design our app based on our revenue strategy.
Our competitive analysis was based on our impressions and experience of the product. Customers/users of the product most likely would have concluded different weaknesses and strengths than the ones we have found. Our limited knowledge and use of the product could lead to us discovering inaccurate strengths and weaknesses.
A heuristic evaluation is only as valuable as the people who do the evaluation and my team is not exactly experts in usability and our business product since none of us have used our competitors’ product extensively. Another caveat is that these evaluations were mainly based on our judgment, attitudes, and opinions. This allows each person to have a different heuristic evaluation with different insights. Also, we were able to find some areas of improvement, but a heuristic evaluation does not give much insight on how to go about making these changes and how they will make a difference.
Our personas and scenarios did not involve much research and data gathering. They were primarily created by our creativity and imagination so we can not rely heavily on our insights from personas and scenarios since they have a high probability of being inaccurate and even completely wrong.