No subject

usability assessment, but you need to be cautious. These kind of
features-based bakeoffs can be misleading if you haven't identified features
most important to your user community beforehand. Defining your requirements
and knowing your user community is critical. A feature rich product can be
hugely enabling to one user community and a source of clutter and confuson
for another. A narrow "cookbook" style product design can help guide a less
experienced staff, but can feel like an intolerable straightjacket to a more
experienced team.

This is one reason we always take a look at the product and assess its
usability from a number of perspectives. We try to take the product in-house
and assess it from the perspective of both lay and professional staffers. We
also survey current users to determine their experiences, as they are more
likely to have come upon bugs and functional disconnects than any first time
user. We've learned that most vendors usually have "slam sheets" describing
everything wrong with products offered by their competitors. While these
assessments aren't reliable, they are a great source for developing
questions to ask of the vendors and their user communities.

There's three additional steps you may want to include.

The first is a Total Cost of Ownership analysis (TCOA). This ought to be at
the heart of any competitive assessment. Some products may not have as many
features, but may provide a more cost effective solution. In order to
determine that, you need to develop some means of quantifying the cost of
using various products. This would include the cost of support, the cost of
supplemental products, the amount of time needed to create effective
solutions using contending products and the cost of the expertise needed to
operate and administer their solutions.

A second step is an assessment of the product lifecycle. Is the product
based on technologies or protocols likely to become dead-ends? Are the
formats proprietary? Products nearing the end of their lifecycle can still
have a lot of features and will be priced attractively. However, if you are
going to face conversion issues as a result of using these products, you
need to identify those issues and assess their cost.

Finally, we've learned from experience that you need to assess the vendor as
well as the product. Is the company financially stable and growing? Are the
technologists responsible for the product design still with the company?
(this is a big red flag, BTW). If not, does the vendor have a team capable
of extending the product and adding additional features? This is often a
hidden cost when looking at Open Source products or products that have
auctioned off to new companies..

To the extent that you can identify your requirements , the risk issues and
the TOTAL COSTS associated with contending products , you'll make your
competitive analyses more useful to your management or clients. Obviously if
you or any other members of this listserve want any help developing this
kind of assessment, we're always more than willing to lend a hand.

Jack Bryar, VP, Research, IGNYT Consulting
jbryar at ignyt.com
http://www.ignyt.com
1-802-843-2735


>
> Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 13:49:24 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Jodi Bollaert <jodi at bluesunworks.com>
> Reply-To: jodi at bluesunworks.com
> To: sigia-l at asis.org
> Subject: [Sigia-l] What Does a Good Competitive Analysis Look Like?
>
> Greetings Siggies,
>
> Would anyone be willing to share their experiences in
> conducting competitive analyses of web sites/web
> applications/software?
>
> I've done a few in the last few years, however, I'd
> like to know how I could make them more effective.
> Most often, I summarize the availability of features
> in a matrix format.  I've also included a deeper
> analysis of pluses/minuses based on usability best
> practices and research.
>