Figma
PowerPoint
2024
Beyond the Benchmark: Turning Competitive Research into Purposeful Design
Duration
4 months
My Role
Associate UX Designer
Team
Project Overview
As part of a four-person team, I worked on a comprehensive redesign of a website for one of the world's largest healthcare manufacturing organizations. Specifically, updating their Bioscience division to reflect the main website's updated branding and improve key user flows. The website serves a highly specialized audience of scientists and pharmaceutical professionals, so our focus was on making dense, technical content more accessible while streamlining the experience across desktop and mobile.
My Role
I served as the UX lead across the entire engagement, owning the full UX heuristic evaluation from start to finish. This meant independently auditing all 11 websites through a UX lens, presenting my findings to the internal team at every stage of the process, and ultimately presenting the complete competitive analysis to the client. Once the research phase wrapped, my role shifted into design, where I led the wireframing of the homepage and collaborated closely with the UI designer and content strategist as the work evolved into high-fidelity screens.
The Challenge
The client had no structured way to measure how their digital experience compared to the competition. Without a clear framework for evaluating usability, content, and UI across the landscape, design decisions were being made without evidence to back them up. The challenge was not only to build that framework and execute a thorough audit across 11 sites, but to synthesize findings across three independent disciplines into a cohesive story that could inform real design direction and be presented clearly to a client audience.
Research and Process
Each of the 11 websites, the client's and 10 competitors, was evaluated independently across three tracks. Each discipline worked autonomously to avoid bias, while regular cross-team check-ins kept findings aligned as patterns emerged. The three tracks covered:
Content: evaluating messaging clarity, tone, hierarchy, and how well each site communicated value to the user
UI: assessing visual design, consistency, branding, and interface polish
UX: examining navigation, task flows, information architecture, and overall usability
My focus was entirely on the UX track, auditing all 11 sites through the lens of user experience and usability best practices.
For each site, the audit was structured around a consistent framework. Every website was broken down by page, and each page was evaluated across all three categories. This approach made it possible to:
Draw direct comparisons between competitors at a page level
Identify where the client was leading, meeting, or falling behind industry standards
Pinpoint specific UX patterns that were working well across the landscape
Surface clear opportunities for improvement with evidence to support them
Presentation
Once all three tracks were complete, the team combined findings into a single competitive analysis deck. I presented my UX findings to the internal team throughout the research process, and then co-presented the full deck to the client. The presentation was structured to tell a clear story, starting broad and then getting granular.
The deck was organized into the following sections:
Feature comparison
A side by side look at key features and capabilities across all 11 brands
Competitive summary
High level overviews of Content, UI, and UX findings with best-in-class callouts for each
Company deep dives
Individual breakdowns for each site, organized by page and then by Content, UI, and UX, covering strengths, weaknesses, and standout moments
The Solution
A rigorously structured, multi-disciplinary audit that gave the client a clear, evidence-based picture of the competitive landscape and a direct path into design. Key outcomes of the research included:
A best-in-class benchmark for UX across the insurance industry
Clear identification of the client's strongest pages and biggest opportunity areas
A shared foundation across Content, UI, and UX that aligned the team before a single design decision was made
Design Process
With the audit presented and priorities aligned, the team moved into design. The homepage was the natural starting point as it had the clearest gaps and the highest opportunity for impact. My design process followed a deliberate progression:
Low-fidelity wireframes
Establishing structure, hierarchy, and user flow based directly on UX audit findings
Collaborative reviews
Checking in with the UI designer and content strategist at key stages to ensure design decisions stayed grounded in research
Iterative refinement
Evolving layouts as UI and copy came together, adjusting the UX framework to support the full vision
The audit findings shaped specific design decisions throughout this phase. Areas where competitors consistently performed well informed the structural choices, and areas where the client was lagging became the clearest targets for improvement.
Final Designs
The final homepage design reflected the best of what the research uncovered across 11 sites. Key UX improvements in the final design included:
Clearer user flows that reduced friction in the path to getting a quote
Trust-building content placed at moments where users are most likely to hesitate
An intuitive page structure that surfaced the most important information without overwhelming the user
Navigation and layout patterns drawn directly from best-in-class examples identified in the audit
Reflection
This project reinforced how powerful it is to ground design in structured research and how much stronger that research becomes when it is cross-functional.
Key Takeaways
Many competitor sites overloaded users with information without clear pathways.
Independent tracks produce better findings
Having Content, UI, and UX work separately before aligning meant each discipline could evaluate without being influenced by the others, which made the synthesis more honest and more complete.
Presenting throughout builds stronger outcomes
Sharing UX findings with the team at each stage, rather than waiting for a final reveal, allowed us to course correct early and sharpen our collective narrative before it reached the client.
Research makes design defensible
Every decision in the homepage redesign had a clear thread back to the audit, which gave the work credibility beyond aesthetics.