How to conduct competitive analysis as part of the design thinking process. Learn frameworks for evaluating competitors through a user-centered lens, not just a business strategy lens.
Competitive analysis in design thinking is fundamentally different from competitive analysis in business strategy. A business strategist looks at competitors to find market positioning opportunities. A design thinker looks at competitors to understand what users are already accustomed to, where existing solutions fail, and what gaps in the user experience represent genuine opportunities for improvement. The lens is the user, not the market.
Design thinking emphasizes empathy research with users, and competitive analysis is a form of indirect user research. When you study how competitors solve a problem, you are studying solutions that real users have already adopted, tolerated, or abandoned. Their choices tell you something about user expectations, habits, and pain points.
Ignoring competitive analysis creates two risks. First, you might reinvent something that already works well, wasting time and effort on problems that are already solved. Second, you might design something that contradicts established patterns users depend on, creating unnecessary friction. Knowing what exists helps you decide where to follow conventions and where to innovate.
Competitive analysis also grounds your ideation in reality. When you brainstorm solutions, understanding the competitive landscape prevents you from proposing ideas that already exist, or from overlooking approaches that competitors have already tested and abandoned (likely for good reasons).
A common mistake is to analyze only direct competitors: companies that offer the same type of product or service to the same audience. Design thinking requires a broader view.
A standard competitive audit evaluates features, pricing, market share, and positioning. A design thinking competitive audit evaluates the user experience. Here is a structured approach:
Sign up for competitor products and use them to accomplish a real task. Do not just browse the marketing site or feature list. Actually try to do something meaningful. Note your experience at every step: onboarding, core task completion, error recovery, help resources, and account management.
Document your experience with screenshots and written observations. Pay particular attention to moments of friction (where you got confused, frustrated, or stuck) and moments of delight (where something worked better than you expected).
App store reviews, G2 reviews, Reddit threads, and social media complaints are a goldmine of unfiltered user feedback about competitors. Look for patterns. When multiple users complain about the same thing, you have found a genuine pain point that your solution can address.
Positive reviews are equally valuable. When users praise a specific feature or experience, that represents a standard your solution will be compared against. You need to match or exceed what users already love about existing solutions.
Create a comparison matrix, but instead of comparing features, compare experiences. Useful dimensions include:
The most valuable output of competitive analysis is a clear picture of where existing solutions underperform. These gaps represent your design opportunities. They fall into several categories:
Competitive analysis during the Initialize stage helps you understand the problem landscape and set realistic scope. Knowing what already exists prevents you from pursuing problems that are already well-solved and helps you focus on genuine gaps.
When conducting user interviews, ask about their current solutions. "What are you using now? What do you like about it? What frustrates you?" These questions produce richer insights than "what do you want?" because they are grounded in real experience rather than hypothetical preferences.
Competitive insights help you write sharper problem statements. Instead of "users need a better way to manage projects," you can write "freelancers who manage multiple clients need a way to track time across projects without the complexity of enterprise tools that are designed for large teams." The competitive context makes the problem statement specific and actionable.
Use competitive analysis to inspire and constrain brainstorming. "What if we did the opposite of what Competitor X does?" is a productive creative prompt. "Competitor X tried this and it failed; what did they miss?" prevents you from repeating known mistakes.
Compare your prototypes against competitor solutions during user testing. Ask participants to use both your prototype and a competitor product to accomplish the same task. Comparative testing reveals whether your design actually improves on what already exists, not just whether it works in isolation.
Competitive analysis should be conducted ethically. Use publicly available information: marketing materials, published reviews, free product trials, and public documentation. Do not misrepresent yourself to gain access to competitor products, do not reverse-engineer proprietary technology, and do not use competitive intelligence to copy features directly. The goal is to understand the experience landscape, not to clone existing solutions.
Design ethics apply to competitive analysis as they do to every other phase of the design process. Studying competitors should make your solution better for users, not just harder for competitors.
For each competitor (aim for 4 to 6, including indirect and analogous), document:
This template takes about 90 minutes per competitor and produces actionable insights for your Define and Ideate stages.
Competitive analysis is most valuable when it feeds directly into your research process rather than living in a separate strategy document. Integrating competitor insights into the Empathize stage helps you understand not just what competitors offer but why users choose them, a question that the Jobs to Be Done framework is designed to answer. Stakeholder mapping broadens this view to include partners, regulators, and other ecosystem players whose actions shape the competitive landscape. For teams working in agile environments, the guide on integrating design thinking with Agile shows how to make competitive analysis a recurring input rather than a one-time exercise.
Related guides: empathy mapping · customer interview techniques · persona creation
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