UX competitive analysis: score competitor flows, then ask people who switched

A UX competitive analysis compares how your product and two to four competitors handle the same user task, step by step, so you can see where each flow helps people and where it trips them up. Do it in two passes: walk each competitor flow with a heuristic scorecard, then interview people who switched between products to learn which of those differences they actually noticed.

The scorecard tells you what is different. The switchers tell you which differences matter. Skip the second pass and you end up with a long list of things competitors do that nobody chose them for.

This page stays at the level of product flows: sign-up, the first project, the settings page people swear at. For the business-level version (who your competitors are, pricing, positioning), see competitor analysis.

The example: the first invoice in an invoicing app

Here is a made-up example, used throughout. Priya is the product designer at a small company that makes invoicing software for freelance photographers. Trial users sign up and then often leave before sending their first invoice. Her question is narrow: how do three competitors get a new user from sign-up to a sent invoice, and what do they do that her flow does not?

One task, four products. That is enough work for a week.

1. Pick one task and two to four competitors

Write the task the way a user would describe it: "send my first invoice to a client." Then choose who to compare against.

Nielsen Norman Group recommends focusing on two to four competitors, because more gets costly and hard to digest. The same article suggests including the products customers are most likely to compare you with, and ones with better usability than yours. Pick the strongest rival you can find. Comparing yourself with a weak product is pleasant and teaches you nothing.

Include the tool people use instead of software, if there is one. For Priya, that is a spreadsheet invoice template that a photographer fills in and sends as a PDF. It has no onboarding flow at all, which is part of its appeal.

2. Walk every flow with the same scorecard

Score each flow against Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, first published in 1994. Nielsen Norman Group refined the wording in 2020 and says the heuristics themselves have not changed. They are general rules of thumb, such as keeping users informed about what is happening, letting them undo mistakes and preventing errors before they occur. They are not a checklist of specific design rules, which is why they work across very different products.

Set up the walk so the comparison is fair:

• Use a fresh account in every product, with the same made-up client and the same three line items. Returning-user shortcuts hide what a new user sees.
• Record the screen and take a screenshot of every step. You will want to show the team, and you will forget which product asked for a tax ID first.
• Count the steps and fields from landing page to sent invoice. Counting is boring and settles arguments.
• Note each problem with the heuristic it breaks and a severity. Nielsen's severity scale runs from 0 (not a usability problem) to 4 (usability catastrophe). It rates severity on how often the problem occurs, how hard it is to overcome and whether users keep running into it.

Have more than one person do the walk. NN/g's guide to heuristic evaluation recommends that three to five people evaluate the same interface independently, without seeing each other's notes until they finish, because any single evaluator misses issues. Then merge the findings. For a competitive review, ask each evaluator to cover all the products, so nobody grades only the one they already like.

Here is part of Priya's merged scorecard (made-up findings):

Short version: one task, the same fake data in every product, problems tagged with a heuristic and a severity, at least three evaluators working alone first.

3. Turn the scorecard into questions, not a to-do list

The scorecard is a list of differences, and it will tempt you to copy the competitor with the fewest problems. Resist that. NN/g's competitive evaluation article puts it plainly: "You want to beat the competition, not copy them."

Priya's scorecard says Competitor A asks for business details later and offers payment links early. It cannot say whether new users care. Maybe photographers abandon her flow at the nine-field form. Maybe they leave because they had not yet booked a client to invoice. (The scorecard has opinions about forms. It has none about wedding season.)

So rewrite each big difference as a question for users:

1. Did asking for business details first make anyone give up, and at what point?
2. Did anyone notice the live preview, or did they send and then check the client's copy?
3. Did the payment link affect which product people kept?

Those questions decide who you need to talk to next.

4. Interview people who switched, and replay the switch on screen

People who moved between products have already run the comparison you care about, with their own clients and money. They are the best source for this second pass, because their switch shows which differences were worth the trouble of moving. Recruit three groups:

• people who tried your product and kept a competitor,
• people who moved from a competitor to you,
• people who moved between two competitors.

Five to eight conversations is a reasonable start for one flow. You are looking for repeated moments, not a vote count. How to interview customers who chose another product covers the general technique for rebuilding a decision.

What makes these interviews different is that you stay at the flow level. Ask the person to share their screen and open the product they use now. Then:

• "Show me how you sent your last invoice." Watch, and note which steps they skip without thinking.
• "When you tried the other product, where did you stop?" If they still have the account, ask them to open it.
• "What did you have to do in the old product that you no longer do?" This finds the steps that felt like work.
• Then your scorecard questions, one at a time, without pointing at the answer you hope for.

In Priya's made-up interviews with six switchers, the nine-field form comes up twice, but as an annoyance people pushed through. The payment link comes up in almost every conversation: photographers chase late payments, and Competitor A put the link on the first invoice. That changes her priority. The form is a severity 3 on paper. The missing payment link is what people switched over.

A watched walkthrough is close to a usability test, but the goal differs. A usability test asks whether people can complete tasks in your design. These interviews ask why someone chose one design over another, so the history of the switch matters more than task completion.

5. Report differences that people switched over

Write the result as a short ranked list, each item backed by a scorecard row and an interview moment. For example: "Offer a payment link in the first invoice. Competitor A does; five of six switchers mentioned getting paid faster." (Made-up numbers, from the example.) Then add the smaller fixes from the scorecard that nobody mentioned, marked as lower priority.

Rerun the scorecard after the redesign, with the same task and the same fake client. NN/g notes that teams with mature UX practices repeat competitive evaluations over time to track where they stand, though it calls this expensive. If you do this once a year, keep the old screenshots. Competitors redesign too, and it is useful to know who moved.

Your next step

Write your one task, list the two to four products you will compare, and walk each flow with the 10 heuristics this week. Then book conversations with people who switched, plus one senior designer who has studied the category from the inside. Instant Expert can find people matching a description such as "product designers who worked on onboarding at invoicing or accounting software companies." You review who it finds and set the offer each person receives. Instant Expert's fee is added on top, and you pay only for calls that get booked. The directory pages for UX consultants, user research experts and heads of design are one place to start.