1 of 11

Slide Notes

As a product designer, you want to know how your product stacks up against the competition.

How can you be sure that you’re really creating something new that offers customers an attractive alternative to competitors’ products?

Knowing The Competition

Published on Nov 18, 2015

No Description

PRESENTATION OUTLINE

KNOWING THE COMPETITION

CADD ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY
As a product designer, you want to know how your product stacks up against the competition.

How can you be sure that you’re really creating something new that offers customers an attractive alternative to competitors’ products?
Photo by chooyutshing

BENCHMARKING

One major component of design is benchmarking, a process that product designers use to analyze and compare details of different brands and models of the same type of product.

With benchmarking, you only focus on the physical properties of the product—you don’t rate the product itself.

How does it work?
Photo by Rsms

OBJECTIVE LOOK

BENCHMARKING PROVIDES AN
In general, benchmarking does the following:

Provides an objective look at similar products in the same price range that are manufactured by different companies
Photo by Choconancy1

COMPARES

FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS
Compares features and functions that similar products offer
Photo by raneko

TARGET SPECS.

HELPS YOU DETERMINE
Helps you determine target specifications for a new product
Photo by Bogdan Suditu

EXAMPLE

DIVE WATCH
Suppose that you are going to design a sports watch—specifically, a dive watch (a watch for underwater divers).
You learn from customers who have purchased dive watches that they like the feel of a heavy watch.

Before you make any decisions about how heavy your new watch design will be, you should know as much as you can about the weight of the dive watch models already on the market.

CHOOSING PROPERTIES

In general, if you can think of a property—such as weight—that makes you want to choose a particular product over another, then that property should be benchmarked.

What other properties might you benchmark to compare dive watches?

For example, is your Product Need team concerned about the prices of competitors’ products? If so, “price” should be a column on the benchmarking table you develop.
Photo by Podknox

BENCHMARKING

TABLE

DIVE WATCH

MEASURING UP

CREATING YOUR BENCHMARKING TABLE
If you are redesigning a product, it’s important to see how the competition stacks up.

Working in your Product Need team, you will benchmark your product.

First decide which information you’ll compare, choosing at least six different characteristics, including the product name, the materials used, and any special features, such as extra alarms.
Photo by Andy Magee

QUESTIONS

AFTER YOU HAVE COMPLETED BENCHMARKING
Once you have completed the benchmarking, discuss the following questions:

Are there characteristics that seem uniform across the different brands and models?

Do any of the models have unique features or characteristics? Do these models stand out as better or worse than the others?

If you were redesigning your product, how would you use the information in this table?

Craig Schmidt

Haiku Deck Pro User