How to Do Competitive Analysis for UX

A UX competitive analysis is not a feature list. That's a product management exercise. A UX competitive analysis is about understanding how competing products work — their flows, their IA, their patterns, their onboarding — so you can make better design decisions.

Here's how to run one that's actually useful.

Decide what you're analyzing

Before you touch any competitor product, define the scope of your analysis. You don't have time to analyze everything. Pick the focus based on what decisions you need to make.

Common focuses:

• Onboarding flow — how does each product take a new user from signup to their first success?
• Core task flow — how does the product handle the primary thing users come to do?
• Navigation and IA — how is content organized, what's in the primary navigation, how do users find things?
• Specific UI patterns — how do competitors handle a specific interaction (filters, search, bulk actions, empty states)?

Narrow scope produces better analysis. A competitive analysis of "the entire product" produces a document that nobody reads.

Choose your competitors

Direct competitors: products that solve the same problem for the same audience.

Indirect competitors: products that solve a related problem, or solve the same problem for a different audience.

Best-in-class references: products that do one specific thing extremely well, even if they're not competitors. If you're designing a search experience, you analyze Google. If you're designing an onboarding flow, you analyze Duolingo.

Three to five competitors is usually enough. More than that and your analysis becomes unwieldy.

Two types of competitive analysis

Feature comparison answers "what does each product do?" It's a spreadsheet. Rows are competitors, columns are features, cells are yes/no or notes. Fast to produce, easy to share with PMs and stakeholders.

Experience analysis answers "how does each product work?" This is more valuable for design decisions. It involves actually using the product, capturing screenshots, annotating what's happening, and noting what's good and what's confusing.

Do both. The spreadsheet gives stakeholders a quick overview. The experience analysis gives your design team the insights that change how you design.

Capturing and organizing findings

Go through each competitor's product with a methodical eye. For each key flow:

1. Screenshot every screen in the flow — don't skip steps
2. Note what the interface communicates at each step (what's the primary action? what's the page trying to do?)
3. Note UX observations — what's confusing, what's clever, what's a pattern worth considering
4. Time the flow from entry to completion if that's relevant

Miro works well for the visual analysis phase. Paste screenshots in rows (one row per competitor), add sticky note annotations, and draw connection lines between screens. The spatial, visual format lets you spot patterns across competitors at a glance.

Try Miro Free

Figma is useful when you need to annotate screenshots more precisely — add call-out labels, highlight specific UI elements, and create a polished artifact for stakeholder presentation.

The analysis: finding patterns and gaps

With your screenshots and notes collected, look for:

Consistent patterns. If four out of five competitors solve a problem the same way, there's probably a reason. Users may have formed an expectation around that pattern. Deviating from it requires strong justification.

Gaps. What frustrates you about each product? Where do flows break down? What's missing? Competitor gaps are design opportunities.

Strong executions. What does each competitor do genuinely well? Not to copy, but to understand the principle. A great onboarding flow teaches you something about progressive disclosure and user psychology that you can apply with your own approach.

Anti-patterns. Bad design decisions that are common in the category. If every competitor buries their pricing, that's an anti-pattern worth deliberately breaking.

Building the report in Notion

Structure your competitive analysis report with these sections:

• Summary — two to three paragraphs on key findings, patterns worth noting, and recommended design implications
• Competitor profiles — one section per competitor with overview, screenshots, and specific UX notes
• Feature comparison matrix — the spreadsheet view
• Key insights — numbered list of the five to ten most actionable findings
• Design implications — direct recommendations based on the analysis

Try Notion Free

Keep the report living. Update it when competitors ship major updates, before significant design initiatives, and when users mention competitors in interviews.

Using findings to inform design decisions

Competitive analysis isn't prescriptive. It doesn't tell you what to design — it tells you what context you're designing within.

Use findings to:

• Calibrate what "baseline" looks like for your category (what users already expect)
• Identify opportunities where you can differentiate on UX quality
• Pressure-test your own design decisions ("three of our top competitors do it this way — are we doing something different for a good reason or are we just being different?")
• Reduce risk on novel patterns ("no one in our category does this — what does that tell us?")

A competitive analysis presented to stakeholders is also useful for alignment. It shows you've done your homework, contextualizes design decisions, and often surfaces product conversations that wouldn't happen otherwise.