Competitve Benchmarking
PROJECT OVERVIEW
This project at UST Evolve, was an initiative aimed to strengthen the market positioning of a leading automobile giant by evaluating and refining the user experience of its corporate website against industry standards.
The client sought to understand how their website compared to competitors in terms of usability, accessibility, and overall user experience, to identify opportunities for differentiation and improvement.
Duration: 2 weeks
Team: 3 UX Researchers and 1 UX Lead
My Role: I co-designed the benchmarking criteria and identified categories of primary and secondary competitors to reference, ensuring our analysis was both comprehensive and strategically aligned with the client’s goals.
Outcome: The project was well-appreciated by our stakeholders and clients, and led to a long-term project contract. 🏆
Process
We began by identifying various categories to evaluate competitors in a structured, comparable way.
Next, we identified primary competitors (direct industry rivals) and secondary competitors (best-in-class references outside the immediate domain) to create a balanced comparison set.
Each website was then evaluated against the criteria using a structured scoring system. This allowed us to highlight not just where competitors excelled, but also the opportunity gaps our client could leverage to strengthen their corporate website’s positioning.
Based on understanding our competator landscape, we proceeded to create a template to benchmark our client against all the several categories of competitors we identified. These criteria were mapped to five pillars of website experience:
Content Clarity
Discoverability & Navigation
Visual Language
Storytelling & Engagement
Accessibility & Responsiveness
BENCHMARKING EVALUATION
To ensure a comprehensive analysis, we conducted a competitive benchmarking study of 25 websites, which included both direct competitors, secondary references, and our client’s corporate site.
We categorized competitors into distinct groups based on their strategic positioning:
Direct Industry: immediate competitors within the automobile sector
Automobile Industry (broader landscape): related brands within the same industry context.
Product Showcase: companies emphasizing strong product-first storytelling
Innovation-Centric: organizations framing their identity around late breaking technology and forward-thinking branding
Customer-Centric: websites prioritizing ease of access, service, and personalized journeys
Youth-Focused: brands with vibrant, trend-driven communication styles
Client Website: assessed within the same framework for comparative insights
Each website was evaluated against the five benchmarking criteria. For each, we broke down sub-criteria and applied a 0–4 scoring scale (from Catastrophic to Excellent), making sure for consistent comparisons across sites. Alongside scores, we captured “what works” and “what doesn’t” insights, paired with annotated visuals to illustrate key patterns.
This structured categorization allowed us to:
Compare like with like (e.g., how the client stood against direct competitors).
Extract inspiration from adjacent industries.
Identify opportunity gaps for differentiation (e.g., where competitors underperformed but the client could excel)
BENCHMARKING OUTCOME
The benchmarking exercise produced a ranked comparison of 25 websites (including our client), scored across the 5 pillars.
Top performers of the competitors, consistently excelled across multiple pillars, demonstrating clarity of messaging, strong visual identity, and seamless navigation.
Our client’s website scored below the industry average, mainly in Content Clarity and Storytelling/Engagement, while showing relative strengths in Discoverability & Navigation.
The results provided a clear positioning snapshot: where competitors were setting benchmarks, where our client lagged, and which gaps presented the biggest opportunities for redesign impact.
This outcome directly shaped our recommendations, ensuring they were both evidence-backed and aligned to industry best practices.
Once the benchmarking outcomes were consolidated, we translated the results into insights for our client’s website redesign. Each of the five pillars was broken down into:
Benchmark Highlight: A leading competitor was spotlighted to show best-in-class execution.
What They Did Well: Clear examples of strategies that elevated the competitor’s performance
Implications for the Client: Targeted recommendations that mapped competitor strengths to opportunities for the client’s site.
On the right, we synthesized these into design approaches, such as:
Uniform Structure & Prioritization – to simplify navigation and highlight critical information.
Product Organization & Showcase – to create modular, scannable layouts that spotlight offerings.
Unified Design System – to ensure brand consistency across digital touchpoints.
Content Strategy & Visual Storytelling – to connect emotionally with users while maintaining clarity.
Adaptive & Inclusive Design – to strengthen accessibility and responsiveness across devices.
Each recommendation was tagged by impact type (eg: Trust-building, Engagement, Differentiation, Conversion), ensuring stakeholders understood both the “what” and the “why” of every suggestion.
Learnings & Reflection
Breaking down evaluation into five pillars with scoring helped balance subjective impressions with measurable outcomes, making comparisons more credible for stakeholders.The client sought to understand how their website compared to competitors in terms of usability, accessibility, and overall user experience, to identify opportunities for differentiation and improvement.
Looking beyond direct industry rivals to include innovation- and youth-focused brands revealed aspirational patterns the client could adopt to differentiate.
Pairing scores with annotated screenshots and “what works/what doesn’t” notes made findings concrete, reducing ambiguity in recommendations.
The biggest value came from mapping competitor strengths into actionable design directions, ensuring the study was not just diagnostic but a roadmap for change.