Box.comcompetitiveAnalysis

HCDE 518 Libby Hanaford, Krista Mortensen, Hannah Yu, Annuska Perkins, Amy Zhong Fall 2010

Box.net Competitive Analysis

Introduction The goal of our user-‐centered design project is to propose design enhancements for the cloud file sharing service Box.net. Our first research activity was a competitive analysis of Box.net to asses Box.net against its key competitors. Competitive analysis is an effective way to gain an idea of the features or design inspirations from similar products that might be later applied to Box.net. We choose to do competitive analysis in the first place as we find Box.net is relatively newcomer in the realm of small midsize business market. We further identified “working professionals” in this market niche as our target user. To gain a deeper insight of the market context, it’s necessary to fully understand the competitor’s strength and weakness that will guide us in the upcoming product redesign. This report presents our methodology, main findings, and analysis.

Methodology Our approach for the competitive analysis was to conduct a usability-‐focused competitive analysis, as opposed to a market-‐focused competitive analysis. We chose a usability-‐focused analysis to highlight the opportunities for Box.net to better meet user needs, not to reach new markets or optimize sales & revenues. To identify Box.net’s strengths and opportunities, we first analyzed the primary concerns of the target user group and categorized them into three key factors: product offerings, usability, and core features.1

Via online research as well as website traffic statistics data 2, we identified Box.net’s key competitors as: Amazon Cloud Drive, Egynte, Google Docs, Microsoft Skydrive, and Sugarsync.

Next, we examined these services by using them ourselves, relying on the service Help content when necessary. Our hands-‐on approach gave us first-‐hand experiences with the products. A limitation to this approach is that we had a short amount of time to use the product, so our findings are from the perspective of new users, i.e., working professionals. Our “usability” findings

1 Our usability competitive analysis method is based on “Understanding Your Users”, Cougar & Baxter.

2 Sources: Box.net Wikipedia, “Cloud Fight! Amazon Cloud Drive vs. Google Docs vs Microsoft Skydrive”, Quantcast.com


would have evolved given more time or if we had used existing users as a source of data. Also, it is challenging to conduct a competitive analysis when we are all separately analyzing a specific site. At first, we were going to include ratings (1 for excellent, 5 for poor). But this rating would have been skewed to our own perspective, without instilling a means to weigh the ratings. So, we did not include the ratings in our report.

Competitor Analysis Findings We assess the following factors:

1. Offering: a. Cost to user – Service offering and prices. b. Cloud storage – Amount of storage available.

2. Usability a. Design Strengths – Usability strengths to help get tasks complete/accomplished. (Efficiency, Organization Clarify, Clear

Labeling, Consistent Design, Effective Visual Design, Readability< facilitating user tasks, providing Help) b. Design Weaknesses – Usability such as interactions such as (challenging, intuitive, too cluttered, inconsistent, flexibility) c. Efficient Navigation – Consistent navigation, clear mechanisms for finding content.

3. Core Features a. Real time editing -‐ Ability for the user to edit documents in their original application. b. Social media integration – Overall appeal to the social aspect of the programs interface. Integration with social media. c. Encryption – of file sending and storage. d. Knowledge Base – Ability to leverage Support knowledge base of training and support materials. e. Live chat – Support person is available for live chat session. f. Video Library Training – Training video library is available for onboarding.

Table 1: Comparison of Offering, Usability, and Features

Box.net

Amazon Cloud Drive

Egynte Google Docs Microsoft Skydrive

Sugarsync

Offering Pricing No free storage;

3 users for 500GB $15 per User Per

5 GB for free; you can pay an extra $1 per extra gigabyte each

Group $24.99; Office $44.99; Company $99.99

1GB Free 20GB for US$5.00/year 200GB for

Free Start with 3 users for 100 GB $299.99 / year; $99.99 / year per additional user;


month year. Unlimited song storage for free.

US$50.00/year $299.99 / year per additional 100GB

Cloud storage

500GB; 2GB maximum file size.

1000 GB storage, approximately 1T

Group 150 GB; Office 1 Tb; Company 1 TB

Unlimited storage for supported formats and 1GB for all others

25GB 2TB maximal available storage. Supports docs, music and photo. Video not supported. Supported file size not stated explicitly.

Usability

Design Strengths

Discussion forum for collaborators; Version control, tracking, and locking; Supports doc review among collaborators; Support of online editing using Zoho; Support of Android & iPhone. Quick refresh rate.

Amazon is leader in cloud storage and redundancy. Does not support Flash devices. Large amount of free music storage. Supports files such music, video, images, and documents.

Well organized, In-‐line support is clearly labeled, Quick Links and Action tab make tasks clear

Fully support of interaction with Google Apps Real-‐time editing Unlimited storage for supported formats

Site is very clean and concise. Edits in original application, prints directly from web app, view and edit in all browsers, able to set up multiple id’s, access files from anywhere

Automatic back-‐up of photos from the mobile device (Android) to local computer; Integration with social network; Outlook plug-‐in that allows sending attachment to SugarSync account.


Design Weaknesses

Confusing interface for managing and troubleshooting shared folders. No separate folders for different file formats.

Unable to share or collaborate. Cloud is basically storage only. Amazon is really focused on enterprise users as this point.

Document view is cluttered with a lot of options (13). Folder view looks interactive, but it is not. Interaction time(to click on a link or refresh window) is slow.

No Live & Video Training No Full text search No file locking and check out

No interaction with Google apps, social media, No file locking check out, Can not upload folders, and no embedded video player support is very limited

No online MS-‐Office apps for editing; No full-‐text search; No file locking and check-‐out;

Efficient Navigation

Web layout designed for business scenarios. History of updates on home page.

Very easy to navigate through the 4 folder options. Can play music via mobile any browser.

keyword, find similar files, file name match. Full indexing of files. Tag search

The navigation is similar to other Google products. Only a few buttons are displayed on the pages, which makes it easy to use. Documents of all types can be easily grouped together into different folders and moved around as needed

Navigation is easy, integration with Hotmail, bing, windows live groups, rss feeds

Navigation bar on the left-‐hand side. Shortcut menu of any stored object (the More cutton) for ease of operation.

Core Fea

tures

Real time editing

No. No No No. No No

Social media integration

Integration with LinkedIn; No integration with Facebook, Twitter.

No No No; Google Docs can share a link in social media like Facebook, but still different from what we discussed

Web link, photo can be pushed to Facebook, Twitter.


yesterday. Encryption Yes, encrypted

file transmission and storage.

No Yes, encrypted file transmission and storage.

Encrypted storage TLS (SSL 3.3) encryption

Knowledge Base

Yes-‐ it is basic help content and FAQs.

Yes Yes No Very limited but enough for the average user to get up and running to share with friends and family

Yes

Video Library Training

Just overview and nitty-‐gritty. Not all links actually contained a video.

No Yes, YouTube Egnyte Channel

No Yes, some with Silverlight

Yes. Full range, all major features.

Analysis Overall, Box.net is has a very solid offering for Individual, Small Business, and Enterprise customers. Box.net’s strengths include its pricing structure, with file storage available at a variety of prices to appeal to a range of users. While Skydrive is free, it does limit its file size, and this will be a hindrance to users who want to store rich media. The usability of the services ranges quite a bit. Some sites feel clean and quick, like Box.net and SkyDrive. Others, like Egnyte are slower to react and the UI is confusing and cluttered in areas. However, Box.net does present usability issues that impact the user’s performance. For instance, granting permissions to a folder was cumbersome and difficult to troubleshoot. In the usability and feature areas, a key theme was Support & Help. Box.net has Help topics documented, and a 1-‐800 support number. It claims to have Video Walkthroughs, however some of these pages were actually empty. Egynte is one service that had exemplary Help & Support. It has links to videos in-‐line in the user interface. For instance, when you are uploading a document, it has a link to a video explaining its File Upload tools.


Based on our competitive analysis, the main drawbacks of Box.net are usability design weaknesses and lack of core features: social networking integration, live chat for support, adequate knowledge base, and video training. In our next phase of user-‐research, we will conduct a survey of professionals who are likely to need file sharing services. The survey will be designed to gauge the priority of the features that Box.net lacks today. For the usability design weaknesses, we will address that issue in Phase 3, which is a usability study of a prototype.


Appendix: Home Pages of Box.net and Competitors

Box.net

Figure 1: Box.net


Competitors

Figure 2: Amazon Cloud Drive


Figure 3: Egnyte


Figure 4: Google Docs


Figure 5: Microsoft SkyDrive


Figure 6: SugarSync

Box.comcompetitiveAnalysis

Documents

competitive analysis

usabilityfocused analysis

competitor analysis

usability findings

user service

consistent design

design enhancements

design inspirations