Page 208 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

12.6 Competitor Analysis 201
12.6.2.1 Competitive Product Collection
Competitive product collection refers to the process to get more referential products
through various methods. Analysis of competitive products can contribute to our
product design. Under the premise to stick to the core demands of the target user,
find more things that can meet the core demands.
Take chat apps as an example. Its core demand is to satisfy the communication
demands between people. In addition to QQ, WeChat, Skype, telephone, SMS,
e-mail, and even sign language can be used to meet the users’ communication
demands. Therefore, these products are listed in our competitive products.
Competitive products collecting method is as follows:
(1) Find the right competitive products from app market, professional Web sites,
and industrial investigation reports;
(2) Use a search engine, such as Google, Baidu, and Yahoo to find the right
competitive products;
(3) User interview: interview the target users to find the right competitive
products;
(4) Think if there are any other ways to realize the core functions, such as
products of the software, materials, services;
(5) Expand part of the functions: Certain functions can be enlarged to find the
right competitive products, such as expanding from buying cinema tickets to
buying tickets
(6) Other industries: Analyze how other industries make achievements. For
example, consider how the financial industry achieves success when devel-
oping a calculator for the education industry.
(7) Others: through fragmentation and operation related method to find compet-
itive products.
(8) Extract keywords based on the key stakeholder analysis and then collect
competitive products.

12.6.2.2 Competitive Products Selection
In the actual work, we divide the selected competitive product into three categories
based on the product functions, match degree, and realization method. In principle,
all competitive products can be classified into one of the three categories:
Competitive products with the same functions: Competitive products are those
which can reach the desired targets and share the same platform (Web, desktop,
mobile terminal) with our designed software.
Competitive products with similar functions: Competitive products are those
which have the same or similar functions and part of their functions conforms to the
requirements and shares a different platform (Web, desktop, mobile terminal) with
our designed software.
Competitive products which have essentially the same function: referring to
competitive products that have different realizing channels or forms but can perform
the same function with the target product. Such products are usually goods or
services with reference values.