Review and audit both competitive and comparative products to determine trends, expectations, and best practices. More in-depth analysis includes facets that each product/system should be compared against, such as how a particular task is achieved, what type of information is available, how a particular feature appears visually, etc. More basic analysis are often a board highlighting key insights.
Example
This example is from an analysis I conducted for the redesign of the Gateway Market website (working with Happy Medium). This was a basic analysis and shown via a single "board".
View Website >Example
This example is from the Vetrax project and served as an inspiration board. Not shown are notes with some of the items capturing key insights or interesting implementations.
Comparative Analysis