Miro Competitive Benchmarking

Our first project within the UX Design institute has been to conduct Competitive Benchmarking on our chosen case study - I have chosen hotels, and the hotel booking process.

As there are such a huge number of different hotels, catering for all sorts of different consumers/users (and their respective needs) I have further narrowed the market by focussing on sustainable/ecological hotels as this is a developing area of the hotel/travel industry and I thought it would be interesting to see what UX trends could be identified within an emerging market and how these fit existing design perceptions.

I selected to look at 4 pages within each hotels websites: the homepage, booking page, availability, and the check-out page. A comment scale has allowed me to grade my comments on each page and collect these into a table for processing in a very methodical way.

Initially I was going to do my competitor analysis in Microsoft PowerPoint, however, the ability to work online and in a collaborative manner led me to Miro which I am getting to grips with! (I did also consider working in Canva as this is a platform I am confident in and find incredibly intuitive/user-friendly).

Miro has so far been relatively easy to use, with only the odd stumbling block; inevitable when learning a new platform. I am enjoying the ability to navigate the project on one huge whiteboard affect as this makes checking the overall document very easy and creating page links is incredibly easy.

I am aware that I am currently focussing a little too much on making the document look aesthetic and in fact the annotations and information is the key take-away so if I were to restart this project I would have utilised tables sooner for creating notes. However, the process of individually reviewing different websites without needing to be in 'solution-mode' is a powerful exercise allowing for a relatively objective review of market competition.

You can see the full project here: https://miro.com/welcomeonboard/dDVsUWgyZUhVVmxwK3RUenpGaHJXR3hZSFBKVWNIT1R5OXVJMmZMWWRJVFFXRXNrWW9PN0s1Y2J3Q2huQUdGTmVwTHlnL1hKQ0JzVkhMbm44VXJxSm45bXhkUmJSSyt2OWw5TWQ1eW9VOURJU2JpcG9STjBGOEovWFFwdHJGV0ghZQ==?share_link_id=488269276586

In regard to competitor analysis in itself, it is such a critical stage of research and a process which I have really enjoyed; it feels like cracking an Algebra equation and finding that X = UX! Taking pre-existing ideas and hitting 'pause' until the evidence supports design decisions breaks down some intimidation to a 'blank canvas' of a project and I can imagine would also make it more obvious where to focus ones efforts should budget, or time constraints, be a concern.

As Jonathan Ive said, it is "Easy to be different. But very difficult to be better." Competitor benchmarking allows you to make evidence-based, risk-reward, design decisions optimising design and effect.