1: Use the sketchboard that we collaboratively developed in class to create a list of features for your product.

2: Develop a list of 2-3 competitors for the product you are doing the UX Design for.

Conducting a Solid UX Competitive Analysis

“Competition brings out the best in products
and the worst in people.” –  David Sarnoff

Most people are familiar with the concept of a competitive analysis; it’s a fairly standard business term to describe identifying and evaluating your competition in the marketplace. In the case of UXD, a competitive analysis is used to evaluate how a given product’s competition stacks up against usability standards and overall user experience.  A comparative analysis is a term I’ve often used to describe the review of applications or website that are not in direct competition with a product, but may have similar processes or interface elements that are worth reviewing.

http://danforth.co/pages/2014/03/01/conducting-a-solid-ux-competitive-analysis/

How to Conduct Competitive Research

Who are your closest rivals””and how do they talk about themselves, as well as your company? It’s time to find out.

Understanding the competition is a crucial business activity for any entrepreneur or business executive. Some companies hire professionals to track competitors and assess the competitive landscape on a regular basis. But it doesn’t always have to be a complicated, time-consuming, and expensive process — particularly given the new wealth of data that can be assembled using the Internet. By investing even a small amount of time, businesses of any size can develop a framework for making competitive assessments, gather intelligence on business rivals, and understand how to position their own brand, products, and company in the marketplace. Not only can you learn best practices from competitors, but you can also learn to avoid the mistakes they make.

http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/05/conducting-competitive-research.html

Excerpt from Undercover User Experience Design
Bowles and Box

Researching the Business

Unlike most users, businesses aren’t afraid to make demands, so it’s usually not difficult to discover business needs. These needs might be unnecessary, vague, or misdirected, but you should still bring them to the surface. Only when business needs are in the open can you explain how to marry them with the needs of the user

The Organization/Company

• What’s the organization’s history?
• What’s the current standing of the organization?
• What are the organization’sg oals?
• Who are our competitors?
• What are our strengths and weaknesses compared with them?
• How is the organization structured?
• How do we want the organization to be seen?

The Site/Product

• What’s the site for?
• What’s the site’s history?
• What does the site do welt? Poorly?
• What technical platform does it run on?
• Does the site use a content management system (CMS)?
• What content management processes support the site?
• How much flexibility for technical change is there?
• How would you rate the site’s usability? Structure? Content? Visual design?

Users

• Who are the current users?
• Are they the people the company is targeting?
• What characteristics do they have?
• Why do they use our site and not a competitor’s?
• What do users say about our site?
• How do they use our site now?
• What do users need to do for us to be successful?

People

• What’s your role in the project?
• Who else is working on the project?
• What are their roles?
• What is the decision-making/sign-off process? How long will it take?
• Who else do we need to talk to?

The project

• What problem will the project solve?
• What are the project’s objectives?
• How do they relate to the overall business objectives?
• Why are we doing the project now?
• What specific project requirements do you have?
• What are the constraints (time, resources, technical, legal, and so on)?
• What’s causing them?
• When do you think the project will be released?
• Have we tried anything like this before? What happened?
• Does anyone else do this well?
• What factors could make the project a success? Could we handle success?
• What issues could throw the project off course? Could we handle failure?
• How could we really screw this up?
• How will we measure success or failure?
• What’s your gut feeling about the project?

Getting Started in UX Design

How to get started in UX Design? That’s an excellent question. Although the number of design resources for beginners grows rapidly, I firmly believe that they do not offer the right approach to the problem.

http://blog.uxpin.com/4621/how-to-get-started-in-ux-design/?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonu6%2FPZKXonjHpfsX67ewlXKCxlMI%2F0ER3fOvrPUfGjI4ATMJqI%2BSLDwEYGJlv6SgFS7PGMbJiz7gFXxI%3D

Blog Post on the differences between various jobs in the web/interactive design industry and how mis-identification of job titles can cause problems.
This is found on thehipperelement.com blog.

http://thehipperelement.com/post/47950319899/do-you-have-the-wrong-job-title