What is a competitor website usability test?

A competitor website usability test is a test and questionnaire that asks respondents to test your competitor’s website usability before collecting their feedback on it (and anything else you’d like to collect feedback on, optionally).

Why are competitor website usability tests used?

Competitor website usability tests have two main uses.

Firstly, they’re used to acquire deep insight into what respondents think of your competitor’s website. If you have a website of your own already, this feedback can help you decide what needs to improve, change, or stay the same in order to stay competitive. If you don’t have a website then this feedback is a treasure trove of useful information to keep in mind when designing it. Since respondents will be testing a live website rather than a prototype, the feedback will be incredibly ‘real’.

Secondly, competitor website usability tests can also be used to compare your competitor’s website to that of your own (if you have one) and track improvement over time.

Who uses competitor website usability tests?

Product designers, UX designers, and design researchers use competitor website usability tests to scout for opportunities to build websites (or improve upon websites that already exist) that are better than that of their competitors.

What types of data do competitor website usability tests yield?

Our competitor website usability test template yields mostly qualitative data consisting of written feedback, spoken feedback, and visual feedback that includes screen and face recordings. The template also includes some quantitative questions that can help you to compare your website to that of your competitors. To compare with your website, you’ll want to take a look at our website usability test template.

What questions are in the competitor website usability test template?

To kick things off, the template presents respondents with a preliminary multiple-choice question designed to add some context to their answers. As is the case with all questions in all Ballpark templates, you can rewrite the question, ask a different type of question, or simply remove it altogether. What you ask and how you ask it is totally up to you.

Next, respondents will need to permit their web browser to record their face, screen, and voice before they can attempt to complete the first website test (e.g. “Go to the website and add a jar of Hot Garlic to your basket”).

After that, respondents are asked whether or not they were able to complete the task with a simple yes/no question that can be quantified. Next, after another task, a qualitative “What did you think of …?”-style question. Again, the number of tasks and types of follow-up questions are completely customizable.

And then to wrap up, respondents are asked to rate how likely they are to recommend your competitor’s website to others on a scale of 0-10 (you can even use this to calculate their Net Promoter Score!). They’re also asked to provide their email address, which you can use to follow up with respondents on their feedback.

Some of the example questions in our paid search test template:

• Have you heard of the brands in these adverts?

• Which of these adverts would you click on and why?

• How would you improve the following advert?

• Beyond this advert, what additional information would you need to be confident to buy?