You might have heard about SWOT analysis in a business context — but have you ever tried to use it for your product design decisions?
In product design, we know a product is never “done.” As markets, technology and people are ever-changing, so should your product. Whether you are working on big shifts (like expanding to new markets, accessing a new customer group or adding more features) or making small tweaks, the question is always: what should we focus on?
Do you want to become better at strategic design decisions? Here is another tool for your toolbox: SWOT analysis for product design.
What is a SWOT analysis?
A SWOT analysis is traditionally applied in business strategy and is a powerful decision-making tool. That’s precisely how we can use it for product design: to make better decisions.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats — a simple framework to evaluate your product landscape and discover areas for improvement.
📦 Start by looking at your product
- Strengths: Think about what’s working well about your product. What makes your product stand out, and why do customers choose you?
- Weaknesses: Try to be objective when collecting what’s not working well. Where does your product fall short, what are some common negative reviews or what is missing?
🔎 Now, look at your market landscape
- Opportunities: What trends or industry shifts do you see that could provide a new opportunity for your product? Where do you see some potential?
- Threats: What changes are happening that will be challenging for your product? Look at your competition, your customer’s preferences and technical shifts.
By thinking through these 4 aspects, you can quickly identify where you need to focus to grow and to gear up against potential threats.
How is a SWOT analysis beneficial for product design?
Besides being an effective decision-making tool, a SWOT analysis has other benefits to offer as well:
Evaluate your product from multiple angles
With a SWOT analysis, you are not only looking at product features and what’s right in front of you, but you are also forced to consider external factors. To gain clarity in all four areas, you need to assess your product from different angles, including your (direct and indirect) competitors, industry trends, technology changes and customer feedback.
Big-picture thinking for strategic decision-making
Looking at multiple areas, especially external factors, will help you not only think about your obvious new product features but also force you to think about general growth. You can make more strategic product decisions that align with your overarching business objectives.
Enhanced collaboration
A SWOT analysis is not done in silo, but it requires cross-functional collaboration. It’s a great tool to break down silos between UX designers, product managers, and developers. A collaborative approach fosters open communication and a shared understanding, resulting in a more robust design strategy and cohesive product vision across teams.
Focus your design efforts on maximum impact
SWOT analysis acts as a compass, guiding teams to allocate their efforts where they matter most. By identifying the most critical strengths to leverage, weaknesses to address, opportunities to explore, and threats to mitigate, you can define priorities and set a clear focus for your design direction. Knowing which ideas will yield maximum impact results in a more efficient and purposeful design process.
How do I do a SWOT analysis for product design?
While you could use it as a simple brainstorming template and collect your ideas for each of the 4 areas, the real power of this tool comes through collaboration. It’s best to be used in a workshop session. Here are some practical tips to ensure your SWOT analysis is effective and actionable:
- Gather a diverse team: Include individuals from various roles, such as UX designers, product managers, developers, and customer support. Diverse perspectives enrich the analysis.
- Define clear objectives: Clearly outline the objectives of your SWOT analysis. Whether it’s improving an existing feature or creating a new product, having a defined goal keeps the analysis focused.
- Comprehensive research: Ground your analysis in market and user data. Collect existing insights, like data analysis, market research, and trend reports. Conduct additional research like surveys, interviews, and usability tests to understand user perceptions and pain points.
- Collaborative workshops: Conduct collaborative workshops or brainstorming sessions to gather insights from team members. This encourages cross-functional collaboration and diverse perspectives.
- SWOT matrix: Create a visual SWOT matrix to organize and categorize your findings. This visual representation makes it easier to identify patterns and relationships.
- Ideas for improvement: For each area, think about specific ideas for improvements that are aligned with your business objective.
- Prioritization frameworks: Use frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize identified elements. This helps in focusing efforts on high-impact areas.
- Take action: Your prioritized list of ideas can inform your product roadmap and turn into specific projects.
- Regular review and updates: SWOT analysis isn’t a one-time task. Regularly review and update your analysis as the product evolves, market conditions change, or user preferences shift.
What resources should I use for a SWOT analysis in product design?
Your SWOT analysis will become more robust if you do your homework and collect data before starting a workshop. Let’s look at some data sources you can use. They are different for new vs existing products.
SWOT analysis of a NEW product
Identifying potential strengths
You don’t have any empirical evidence yet for a new product, but you can understand what is currently missing and what value your product can offer for your target audience.
- Market research: Analyze the current market and identify unmet needs
- Surveys/ focus groups: Get insights from consumers about what’s missing
- Forums and reviews: Look at online places, where your target audience is talking about their needs, sharing frustrations or leaving reviews about your competitors
Anticipating potential weaknesses
Starting with a new product often has inherent weaknesses (you need to build awareness and loyalty). With an iterative design approach and prototype testing, you can collect feedback about perceived weaknesses:
- Usability prototyping: Create prototypes and conduct usability tests to identify potential user experience hurdles.
- In-depth user research: Understand potential user objections or concerns through comprehensive user interviews and surveys.
Exploring opportunities for innovation
Novelty itself is not always an opportunity: you have to provide value. Research is here helpful as well:
- User-Centric Design Thinking: Involve potential users early in the design process to capture insights and uncover unexplored opportunities.
- Emerging technologies: Leverage new technologies to create innovative features that address current user pain points.
Mitigating potential threats
Whether you have a new or an existing product, the market changes will always be a threat. You always want to think three moves ahead — so keep an eye on your market landscape:
- Competitor analysis: Identify potential threats from competitors and design strategies to counteract them.
- Regulatory landscape: Anticipate potential legal or regulatory challenges and design with compliance in mind.
SWOT analysis for an EXISTING product
Identifying strengths in current designs:
If you have an existing product, you will likely have specific product data you can use for your analysis.
- Performance metrics: Evaluate loading times, responsiveness, and overall performance to highlight technical strengths.
- User satisfaction: Analyze user feedback, reviews, and satisfaction metrics to pinpoint aspects of your design that users love.
- Usability testing: Conduct usability tests to identify features that contribute to a positive user experience.
Recognizing weaknesses in current designs:
The same data you looked at for strengths will also tell you something about your weaknesses. In addition, look at your competitors as a comparison and benchmark.
- User feedback analysis: Pay attention to common complaints, recurring user issues, and feedback indicating improvement areas.
- Usability testing: Uncover pain points by observing user interactions and identifying stumbling blocks in the user journey.
- Competitor benchmarking: Compare your product against competitors to identify areas where your design falls short.
Exploring opportunities for improvement:
When it comes to exploring opportunities, think beyond your existing customers. Take a look at general market and technology trends.
- User trends and preferences: Stay abreast of emerging trends and changing user preferences to identify opportunities for design enhancement.
- Competitive analysis: Analyze competitors’ products to identify features or trends that can be integrated into your design.
- Technological advancements: Stay informed about new technologies that can enhance your product’s features and capabilities.
Mitigating threats to user experience:
Similar to our list of new products, you need to stay up to date with market and technology changes:
- Market research: Keep an eye on market trends, user behaviour shifts, and potential disruptions that may threaten your design.
- Regulatory landscape: Address potential threats related to data security, privacy concerns, or regulatory changes.
- User feedback on competitors: Learn from user feedback on competitors’ products to preemptively address similar concerns in your design.
Common pitfalls to avoid
The outcome of a SWOT analysis is only as good as the input. Be mindful of the following aspects:
- Biased perspectives: Be aware of biases that might skew the analysis. Ensure participation of people with different backgrounds and perspectives. Encourage open dialogue and diverse viewpoints to mitigate subjective judgments.
- Overlooking user feedback: User feedback is invaluable. Don’t overlook or dismiss it. Incorporate real user experiences and sentiments into your analysis.
- Lack of preparation and research: Don’t just use your gut feeling or personal assumptions. Put in the effort and look at different data sources to gain a better understanding of your market and competitors.
- Lack of actionable insights: Ensure that the analysis translates into actionable insights. Each identified strength, weakness, opportunity, or threat should lead to a tangible design strategy or improvement plan.
By following these practical tips, you’ll not only conduct a comprehensive SWOT analysis but also transform it into a dynamic tool for driving effective UX design decisions. Now, armed with a well-informed SWOT analysis, you can strategically shape your design processes and deliver user experiences that resonate with your audience.
Questions to keep in mind for your SWOT analysis
Here is a cheat sheet of questions you can use for your SWOT analysis workshops.
Strengths:
- What problems is your product solving for your customers? What needs does it satisfy?
- What does it do better than other products available on the market? Which features stand out as being significantly better than competition?
- What do customers value the most? What do they talk about in reviews?
- What could your customers not live without that your product offers?
Weaknesses:
- What is not working well? What are your customers complaining about?
- Which are the missing features that your clients need the most?
- What solutions do your competitors offer/ where do you fall behind?
- What are possible reasons why a customer would choose your competitor over you?
Opportunities:
- What are the needs of different customer segments? What are unmet expectations?
- Are there other customer segments that might benefit from your product offering?
- Can your product be offered to other markets?
- What partners do you have in your industry to offer a bundled service?
- What changes in technology can you leverage to improve your product?
- What behaviour changes do you see that you can leverage?
Threats:
- What are your direct competitors doing? How likely will they launch a new product that is better or more appealing than yours?
- What are your indirect competitors doing? Are they substitute demand for your products and services?
- Are there any market shifts that will create a barrier for suing your product?
- Are there any start ups or new entrants that aim to disrupt the industry?
- How are consumer preferences changing regarding pricing, product features and service models?
- What is the impact of technological change in your industry?
- Do other business and economic factors have an impact on your industry (e.g. duties, offshoring, automation, self service,…)?
Key take-aways
A SWOT analysis can be used as a strategic tool for decision-making in product design. It helps you to use big-picture thinking and keep overarching business goals in mind. When used in a collaborative setting, you can bring your team on board and create a shared product vision.
🫵 Over to you
Where do you see room for a SWOT analysis in your product design process? Try it out on the product you are currently working on: what new ideas do you discover?
💡 Want to learn more?
Here are some additional resources:
