In short: Use competitors' products, landing pages in prototype testing in addition to your product or service idea to learn how it compares to what exists in the market.

Using competitor's to have more prototypes to test

In a design sprint, the goal is to create innovative and valuable service or product ideas. Often, you might develop different prototypes to test which idea has more potential. But time constraints can make it hard to create multiple versions of the same service.

When time is tight, use the services and products of your competitors. And add them to your testing scenario.

A practical example

For example, I once worked with an NGO who wanted to launch a new traineeship program. We created a landing page that showed the program's benefits and a promotional video as our prototype.

We then tested this prototype next to the landing pages from other NGOs and big businesses who were also doing traineeship programs. And as we're smart little humans, we didn't say which page was fake or ours.

We then asked participants to compare the different offerings and tell us which one best fit their lifestyle and career choices.

Learning Through Comparison

The beauty of using competitors' services, is that we didn't just get insights about what worked in our idea. But instead we also learned a shit ton about how people perceive it compare it to existing options. Neat!

Made with AI help
This article is based on an Audio note I made while walking, which was transcribed and clean by the app AudioPen, and I then reviewed it and improved it by hand.