Moving WebWord: Embrace, Destroy, & Consume Your Competitors' Web Sites

Embrace, Destroy, and Consume Your Competitors' Web Sites

In the world of Web development, your competitors' Web sites are perhaps your single most important development resource. Your competitors are doing everything they can to build the coolest, fastest, most awesome Web sites. They want visitors, they want hits, they want sales. With this kind of motivation, your competitors are certainly an excellent resource. Without a doubt your enemies have great ideas, and it is your job to take what they have and improve it via usability.

I'm not saying you should steal what they have. I'm saying that you ought to fully embrace these sites. You need to come clean; you need to admit that they have some things that you don't. Embrace their ideas. Embrace the notion that they have done things right.

Now, it is time to splash some cold water on your face and wake up. Your job, especially if you have a commercial site, is to destroy your enemies. You must crush them under your foot. But hold on. Before we get to hasty, we must make our battle plan.

First, your must ferret out the very best ideas from your competitors' sites. Make a list of every good idea. Take detailed notes.
Second, be sure to run your users through your competitors' sites. You need the data. You must find out how users use your competitors' sites or you won't know what ideas, designs, and features are best.
Third, you must prioritize this information. Ask your users to rate those things that are most important.
Fourth, you need understand how this data fits with your strategic business plan. That is, you must know your business or organizational objectives or this data will be useless.

Taken as a whole, the information gathered will help you know what things are cool, useful, and usable about your competitors' sites. You have embraced and acquired what you want from your competitors. You have sucked the marrow from the bones of their sites! If you have done things right, your users have told you what is great about your competitors' Web sites.

Finish Consuming!

At this point, your job is still not done. You have not really destroyed your enemies. You have only taken the things that are good and "wounded" them a bit. It is now time to scrutinize both your site and your competitors' sites from a usability point of view. You should do everything in your power to understand what sucks about your competitors' sites. If you don't understand their flaws, you are doomed to repeat them on your site. Use the data you gathered from your user testing to understand the problems of your competitors' sites. Think of things this way: If users hate your competitors' sites, and your site is very similar, then it should be obvious that users will not like your site. During this 'attack phase' you should ask users to destroy your site too. The more data, in this case, the better.

At this point, you now understand the importance of embracing the great ideas from your competitors. And, you should see why you must critique and test these ideas.

But remember, your site is a target too. Ask yourself the following two questions.

How do users see and use my site?
How do my competitors see and use my site?

Fortunately, you can gather data about your users and you can test ideas that you might have. Just listen to them. However, you have no idea how your competitors are using your site. If your competitors are savvy, which is best to assume, they are using your site. To stay ahead of them you must consistently and constantly engage in preemptive usability strikes. You must know your users, of course, but you must also stay two steps ahead of your competitors. If their sites are cool and usable, your site must be more cool and more usable. Thus, you must decide immediately that your site will constantly evolve. You must act now. You must fully accept that your site will need to be fresh and engaging. This requires relentless usability testing.

Here are some things to consider as you go about waging your usability war:

Evaluate your site in relation to both your competitors' sites and your organization's strategic plan. You must expect to find flaws with your site. It is expected that user-centered principles are central components of growth projections, marketing campaigns, user support, and so on. Usability must ooze out of your company.

You must begin immediately to sell usability to your organization if is not a major concern in your organization. Usability saves money, lowers costs, and usually decreases development lifecycles. For Web sites, these things are of great importance. Realize that growth and maintenance can eat up much more money than initial site development.

Realize that your competitors will be using your site, just as you are (hopefully) using theirs. Under certain circumstances, it will be in your best interest to join forces with your enemies. You want growth. If you orchestrate things appropriately, the growth of your Web site can be augmented by the growth of your competitors' sites. Riding their growth (and their usability) is not shameful, it is good strategy in many cases.

Each and every user is a four star general in the usability army. They know what they want and they know what they need -- give them the opportunity to lead you into battle.