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Elevate your user experience to rise above your competitors.

UX competitive benchmarking offers a view of your market from the users’ perspective, highlighting where your brand excels and opportunities to jump ahead of your competitors. Through comparative usability testing with real, live users, we help you identify what you’re doing well and where you need to improve. This enables you to mine the best ideas from your competitors and learn from their efforts without having to create multiple prototypes yourself. Competitive benchmarking helps you keep your friends close and your competitors closer, elevating your business with the help of your users.

We help answer questions like:

  • Where do we stand versus our competitors in users’ eyes? 

  • Do other companies have better designs than us? 

  • How is our brand perceived relative to our rivals? 

  • Has our design improved over time? 

  • How can we make our competitors’ best ideas our own? 


What can I expect from UX competitive benchmarking with Centralis?

We’ll work with you to identify the most informative competitors to include and design our testing to best address your business goals.

Rigorous Methods

We run moderated usability testing sessions to hear directly from users what works best and what needs work for both your experience and your competitors’.

 
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Flexible Reporting

We can deliver anything from a comprehensive assessment to a quicklist of immediate issues, depending on your needs and timeline.

Robust Research

We’ll help you choose the competitors with a range of different designs to maximize our learning and exposure.

 

Informed Recommendations

We provide concrete recommendations for surpassing your competitors in terms of user experience, in the short term and in the long term.


"The sessions were fantastic and the output incredibly valuable to the team."
- Centralis Client

FAQs about UX Competitive Benchmarking

How do you select competitors to include?

We’ll work with you to select a diverse set of relevant competitors with a variety of factors in mind, including who the key players are in your market, any newcomers to keep an eye on, and who is solving similar design problems in a different way.

 

How do you recruit users?

We employ a variety of recruitment methods to find your target audience on your schedule, including working with trusted recruiting firms or from a list of your current customers, if desired. Our targeted recruiting can also give us access to non-public (login required) competitor services during testing, allowing us to fully understand your competitors’ user experiences.

When should I do this type of testing?

We recommend competitive benchmarking before initiating a redesign, when you're about to launch new features, and periodically as your experience evolves. This will establish a baseline and outline where you can go, with timely updates to ensure you’re on track to maintain leadership in your market.

What metrics do you include in your evaluation?

Competitive benchmarking is primarily qualitative, augmented with quantitative metrics such as NPS ratings and SUPR-Q scores. We also include user surveys and adjective elicitation to explore how the various brands are perceived, as appropriate.

More questions about UX competitive benchmarking?


UX Competitive Benchmarking in Action

Case Study: Ready for Takeoff

United Airlines sought to refine and elevate the user experience of United.com, making it easier for customers to book flights on their flagship site. As part of this effort, United asked Centralis to rigorously test both their current site and their new site against those of their competitors.


Why Centralis

We have over 20 years of experience and the numbers to prove it:

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"This was eye opening for our engineering team and an
important strategic step for the new Marketing team."
- Centralis Client