Product feature comparison matrix template

You might be comparing different versions of your own products free, student, business, enterprise , or doing a competitive analysis comparing products created by different companies. One set of features might use simple check marks to indicate whether a product supports the feature.

For another set of features, you may want to indicate numeric or text-based specifications likes sizes, quantities, operating system, screen size, etc. For a competitive analysis, you may want to rate the quality of a feature using a star rating or numeric ranking. License : Private Use not for distribution or resale. These kind of analysis helps in understanding and identifying which Vendor Product meets to our expectation.

While finalizing a particular Product, we need to consider the Product Pricing as well as a main criteria. Hope this article help you out in understanding the practical approach of a Feature Comparison Matrix. Do let me know you feedback through your comments. As We Work We Learn I feel it will also be good to include a column against the features that will state whether it is "Good to have" or "Must have".

When a company goes for a product improvement, it is obvious many things will creep in. What is your say? This holds good when the organisation is ready to buy a lock stock and barrel product. It is also useful to find out a best quality conscious vendor who will provide you quality goods and products. Below you can get a free product comparison template excel which can be used as a handy tool to analyze products or feature category between two or more competitors or vendors in the market.

Product comparison done ahead of time can help you to make proper shopping list including only quality products and best vendors. Downloading of the product comparison template excel is must if you wish to customize it with your own details and information so feel free to click on the following download button and save product comparison template excel in your macbook, computer or laptop. Excel workout template is here to help you plan workout on daily or weekly basis.

Again, adding the comparison selection right in the search results might be a good option to consider as well. There is another option, though. We could also highlight feature comparison as part of the global navigation. If you have a very limited range of products, each of them targeting a specific audience, it might be useful to clearly communicate what groups of customers each product is designed for.

For example, Konica Minolta provides a separate feature comparison link in the main navigation. Still, customers can export and print out results for easy scanning and reading. Vizio prominently integrates feature comparison in the main navigation. The attributes are broken down in groups, too, and displayed as accordions in a tabular view, while the products always remain visible in a floating bar.

In fact, it is quite difficult to notice on the product page as well. The attributes are disclosed progressively, upon a tap or click. If you have just a few products in the inventory, clearly labelling and targeting each group of customers might be a better and simpler option. Once we know which pages a feature comparison will appear on, we should ask ourselves how users will actually add items for comparison.

This requires us to look very closely into the microscopic details of how the feature is indicated and how the user would interact with it. A checkbox naturally communicates that and how an item can be selected and unselected, and with a proper label in place, it conveys the functionality unambiguously.

Now, where would you place that checkbox , you might ask? We also have to indicate the change of state for screen readers. Every selection should be easy to unselect with one tap as well, without resetting the entire selection. Still, we could gently highlight it for a blink of a second with a subtle transition or animation once a new item has been added for comparison. Wait a second! You might be thinking: well, if the feature comparison is so important, why not display a confirmation in a lightbox, prompting the customer to choose to go straight to the comparison or to continue browsing on the website?

Well, the problem with this option is that it massively interrupts the flow. Should they want to compare, they can compare easily as well. And the focus always stays on what matters the most: the products. We can solve this problem by displaying a semi-transparent comparison overlay at the bottom of the page. The overlay could appear when a customer adds the very first item for comparison and could fade away when the selection is cleared.

Home Depot uses a 60px tall comparison overlay at the bottom to highlight thumbnails of the selected products. The overlay us used to guide users through the selection — for example, by explaining how many items are required for comparison. Electrolux displays notifications about selected items in the 75px tall bottom bar. It might be a bit too subtle to understand quickly. Appliances Connection uses a slightly less subtle 40px tall bar at the bottom, with a clear link indicating comparison and access to recently viewed items.

The comparison view is sliding from top to bottom, and users can switch to recently viewed items as well. The design of showing and hiding similar features is slightly off, tucked in the upper-right corner. Abcam implements the bottom bar slightly differently, as an accordion with items lined up in a vertical list. In fact, overlay seems to be a quite common solution, and in fact, it can be helpful in quite many ways.

We could also group similar items and complement a comparison list with a shortlisted selection of products. Instead of prompting the customer to pick one type of products, then select specific items of that type and compare them, we could enable customers to add products of different kinds, group them in the background and keep them accessible for any time later — not necessarily only for comparison. Think of it as a sort of extended list of favorites, or wishlist, with each selection getting a label and perhaps even a shareable URL.

Digital Photography Review does just that. Each item can be removed individually, or the customer can remove an entire group, too. But what if the customer chooses to compare more items after all? Well, not many customers are likely to do that, except for one specific exception. If they choose to save a large number of items, we could of course let them navigate through products using a stepper, but perhaps by default we could reshape the table and extract highlights, advantages and disadvantages instead.

That might be slightly less annoying than being disallowed to add an item for comparison altogether. Eventually, after tapping on those checkboxes or links, the customer hopefully will choose to see a comparison of the shortlisted options side by side.

Now, the comparison could appear in different ways:. In most situations, the second option might be difficult to pull off meaningfully, just because of the amount of space that a feature comparison needs to enable quick comparison of attributes.

Both the first and the third options are usually easier to implement, but the first one might appear slightly faster because no navigation between pages is involved. However, it will also require proper implementation of the URL change based on the state of the comparison. With a standalone page, this problem would be slightly easier to solve.

The fourth option depends on your stake in the never-ending discussion of whether links should be opened in new tabs by default. While it might make sense for PDF files or any pages that might cause a loss of inputted data, it might not be critical enough for a comparison view. Ideally, you could provide both options — the link could lead directly to the comparison view in the same tab, and a Wikipedia-like external-link icon could be used to indicate a view to be opened in a separate tab.

In the end, we just want to help users find relevant comparable attributes quickly. What better way to find them than by first asking the user to select the attributes that matter most to them? For instance, we could extract some of those attributes automatically by looking into the qualities that appear in reviews for selected products, and suggest them in a small panel above the side-by-side comparison — pretty much like tags that the user can confirm or add.

Once the relevant attributes are defined, we could calculate the match score for all selected products based on reviews and specifications , and if their average is way below expectations, suggest alternative products with a higher score instead. There, we could show options to purchase the item or pick it up in a store nearby more prominently.

Top Ten Reviews manages to display 10 products in a side-by-side comparison. Each product has a rating broken down by specific groups of features, but also an overall score. When looking into comparisons, we naturally think about feature comparison tables, but perhaps a filtered view or a visual view would be a better option for comparisons — especially for complex ones. Product Chart , for example, uses a matrix presentation of products, with price mapped against screen size for monitors.

Features and attributes can be adjusted as filters on the left, and the fewer the candidates, the larger the thumbnails. But what if we drop the idea of having a dedicated feature comparison altogether — and use a slightly more integrated approach instead? A product page could display extracted review keywords upon tap or click. Based on measurements of an apartment, for example, we could suggest electronics and furniture that might work well.

The feature might be particularly useful for the fashion industry as well. The better and smarter the filtering options, the less critical a side-by-side feature comparison could be.

While many of us would consider the table element to mark up a comparison table, in accessibility terms, sometimes that might not be the best idea. The comparison could be just an unordered list li with headings — for instance, an h2 for the title of each product and h3 subheadings for the features of each product.

Screen readers provide shortcuts for navigating between list items and headings, making it easier to jump back and forth to compare. That way, we could basically create cards, collapsed or not by default, and then progressively enhance the list towards a tabular view for easier visual scanning. Still, with labels and headings, a table might be a good option as well.

A more general purpose solution is to offer customers choices of how the data is presented — for example, to choose to view all data in a single table, or to select certain objects for comparison. That was quite a journey.