Executive Summary: Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis was performed in which ten leading architecture / interior design firms where compared to each other to establish common navigational, information architecture, and interaction design techniques.
The firms were chosen from Architectural Digest and Architect Magazine with the filters of: location, and focused areas e.g;(interior design or architecture). The two magazines credibility and long term establishment contributed to the list viability rather than public opinion. The criterion to perform the competitive analysis was selected because of its broad stroke to capture industry standards across multiple firms instead of selected criteria that centered on a particular type of firm.
The firms offered three types of navigation e.g; (global, local, and contextual embedded navigation). Only tvsinteriors.com and ewingcole.com are the only firms that did not offer contextual embedded navigation i.e;(links specific to a particular page, document or object.) Providing users with links while reading a article or accomplishing a task will help with clarifying concepts and efficiency. Having the global plus local navigation allows people to identify a main topic and then explore various options that meet their particular needs or tasks.
Information architecture evaluation included site maps (table of contents), site indexes (similar to back of a book index), guides, and search. Only three firms out of ten integrated a site map into their web site e.g;(hok.com, rockwellgroup.com, and perkinswill.com). Since all the firms’ sites did not have tons of content to navigate, having a sitemap was unnecessary. Although a site map might be unnecessary for the firms, having a site index of some sort combined with a search capability to identify clients and explore projects is something gensler.com implemented.
Having your web site visitors get involved so to speak with the content on your site is what the interaction design portion of the analysis aims to evaluate. Having news articles created by the firm or by linking to an article is an import feature to have for validating your approach to a particular project or to drive site visitors to your web site. All the firm sites showcased their past project using pictures but gensler.com did the best implementation by using a sort feature followed by placing text onto the picture as your mouse moved across the picture. Two firms used video on their sites, hok.com and gensler.com. Hok.com used it as a general overview of company policy on their firm’s profile page and the effectiveness was lost because it was a “typical” PR piece i.e;(Picture of workers pretending to work and standing around a table and the company CEO speaking while pictures of company policy fade in and out.
The results of this competitive analysis lead to a conceptualize framework for websites in the architecture/ interior design firms.
Competitive Analysis Word Doc
Concept Model
