Assignment 2: Competitive Analysis

The Competitive Analysis, I feel, is a great way to get a surface-level evaluation of the website along with their competitors -- and converse, I feel like it should be taken only at surface level. With competitive analysis, we weigh more importance to features and aesthetic qualities of a website, which is perfectly fine for quick evaluation purposes, but it doesn't tell us much in terms of usability.

For example, example essays were asked to evaluate UrbanSpoon.com and students found their Audience, Design, Features and compared them with their competitors. The tables featuring arrays of checklists may give a firm some idea about which features are lacking and how their design could be improved better, but it doesn't mean it eases their usability of the website.

However, as an argument for the competitive analysis, it gives a quick and easy way to view the product's needs with very little manpower. The assignment shows us that, even with a few simple clicks, one can easily evaluate (albeit on a surface level) a product. As internet users, we have certain universal needs like ease of use, good aesthetics and simplicity which we can easily evaluate a product with. Best of all, it doesn't require a fancy lab to test since it only requires logging into a website and taking note of features present and lacking.

I learned from this assignment that it's not actually the tables and charts that provide the most information, but actually the synthesis of the data that provides the most information. What I mean by that is, charts and graphs don't let us know about the site more than actual critical thinking about why and how a product lacks a feature, and how important or trivial it is to bring that feature to life. For example, we all noticed that MemCatch, in its early stages, was lacking a comprehensive social networking feature. When I put it down in my report, I made an assumption that it was because it was focusing more on its information sharing aspect. Now that MemCatch has made greater strides in improving the site and social networking aspects, we can see how the gradual shift from information clipping to social networking changed the face of the site over a course of time.