How to be a client: These guys do it, so should we

Posted on 06 January 2011 by Pete Duncanson Tweet

You'll no doubt be tempted to look at your competitors when you commission a new site or make updates to an existing one. You're right to check them out. However, don't just try and grab what they have because it's there.

We're just finishing up reviewing your site traffic analytics data because we've been testing some new features that we thought would be a good addition to your site but unfortunately they didn't really make any improvement to conversions so we're going to remove them.

Seems fair enough right? Trying something out that unfortunately doesn't work as well as anticipated so it's going to be removed from your site shortly.

This is commonplace across a huge number of sites from small shops to huge e-commerce companies. Testing, testing, testing! Always trying to squeeze more out of a site through sensible feature development (or removal!).

They've got it, so should we...

You've just seen something on a competitors site. They're a big player in your industry, that thing on their site isn't on yours...

It absolutely must be on your site too. Why would they have it if it wasn't a good idea?

Disaster?

Not on your life. Before you speak to your web designers and tell them you've just seen this "amazing" feature and obviously it should be something they should roll out asap, take a minute to consider the picture at the start of the article.

You're not privvy to what your competitors are doing internally. You're just seeing the store front. In much the same way as a shop might look clean and shiny but the books show it's about to go out of business. You just don't know.

You could be about to spend a fortune developing a feature because you've seen it elsewhere that you don't know is about to be removed because it doesn't work!

Always be aware of competition but design for YOUR users

It may sound like the most obvious advice in the world but you'd be amazed how many companies want to copy features and functionality of their competitors (or worse, big sites like Google or Amazon) just because they feel it wouldn't be there if it didn't work.

By knowing your own users and designing a site that helps them achieve what you want them to, you'll always provide an efficient user experience and keep design and development costs down.