UX Design Project - PetSafe Brands

Conducting a competitive analysis to provide strategic insight that improved negotiations

Picture you are the CEO of a company that is an established leader in the pet containment industry with decades of experience keeping pets safe with vetted technology.

Unfortunately, your company begins losing significant market share to new competitors. These competitors are small startup companies moving very fast and iterating on technology that meets customer needs you currently are not meeting–a cheaper alternative to installing a physical fence that requires no manual labor to install like a buried wire electric fence requires.

There are multiple projects in progress with the goal to offer customers solutions in this new niche; however, building everything in house takes time–a luxury you do not have.

To help move those projects along more quickly, you begin conversations with a smaller competitor to negotiate a potential partnership. You task your internal leaders of the Engineering and User Experience departments to evaluate the competitor product and advise on the validity of a potential partnership.

The Problem

What I Did

Evaluated the Product

I evaluated the unboxing experience, the physical product, and the materials included in the box using the SWAT analysis approach.
Evaluated the App

I evaluated the app–created an account, set up a collar, created a boundary, and navigated all parts of the app–using the SWAT analysis approach.
Shared the Findings

I compiled all my thoughts, learnings, and discoveries into a presentation shared with key stakeholders and the CEO.

Key Project Takeaway

Knowing your audience and strategically approaching the analysis and report with their concerns in mind leads to more impactful findings improving business decisions.

Challenges

• Having only one full day to complete the entire analysis and report.
• Having little context about the strategic conversations happening and what specifically leadership wanted to be evaluated.
• Having no opportunity to present my report and relying only on the context I could provide in PDF form.
• Making recommendations based on limited interaction with the app and product.
Learnings

• Providing users with easy access to support material can greatly improve the experience.
• Evaluating the competition regularly allowed us to learn and improve our interactions.
• Creating a cohesive app experience is an important part of the product experience.
• Working quickly under tight timelines is challenging but satisfying.

Physical Product

I interacted with the physical product to assess their Industrial Design, intuitiveness of interactive elements, and unboxing experience.

What I Found

My initial thoughts from interacting with the collar were:

the plastics used made the collar feel cheap
the battery design did not feel secure and was prone to breaking easily
the attachment clip on the back did not feel sturdy making the collar prone to falling off the strap easily.

The packaging design and unboxing experience was more advanced and modern-looking than ours.

The simple layout highlighted the product’s features and benefits well. While there was a lot of content on the box, the layout kept me from being overwhelmed.

App Product

The main focus of my analysis was the app since an Engineering teammate was diving deeper into the physical product and inner workings of the technology.

What I Found

I downloaded the app, created an account, set up a subscription, created a profile for my pet, created a geofence for my pet, and began to use the product to evaluate additional features like activity, heatmap, walks, etc.

Here are some of my high-level observations:

the app provided easy access to support–explaining LEDs, icons, processes, etc.
the app design felt very disjointed–some parts more “designed” than others
the number of features and data supported could be overwhelming to navigate and absorb.

SWOT Report

After interacting with the physical product and the app, I spent time on their website reading customer reviews. I then compiled my high-level observations into a presentation.

Consolidating the Findings

The competitive analysis was requested to help facilitate a conversation with the owners of Wagz.

While I was not given context about the conversation or the type of analysis desired, I approached the report with a SWOT analysis focus.

Since I only had one full day to interact with and evaluate the product and then create a report, my findings were limited.

I also had to keep in mind I would not have the opportunity to present my report and provide additional context or answer questions.