Google Mobile Labs
Google wanted to help their clients improve the performance of their mobile websites and, in turn, increase conversion rates and ROI from their Google Ads spend. Many businesses knew mobile mattered but struggled to prioritise UX improvements internally, especially when those changes required executive buy-in and cross-functional effort.
The challange
How Might We help senior decision-makers see the value of mobile UX improvements and act on them?
To do this, they created Mobile Labs and partnered with a select group of UX agencies across EMEA. How Might We was chosen as the exclusive South African partner, working closely with CX Partners and the wider EMEA team to bring the programme to life.
Mobile Labs are one day workshops that allow business leaders to watch real customers use their mobile sites, observe friction firsthand, and work together on a practical plan for improvement. Each lab combines live user testing with collaborative problem solving to turn research into action and build alignment around what matters most.
What we did
As Google’s South African Mobile Labs partner, we delivered labs across the country between 2020 and 2023 for clients in retail, finance, and telecoms. We worked alongside Google and fellow EMEA agencies to ensure a consistent, high quality experience across regions.
Each lab included:
- A kick off with the client team to clarify the challenges to explore and define the recruitment criteria for the customers we would test with.
- Facilitating and recording five usability sessions with real customers interacting with the client’s mobile experience.
- Providing a live viewing experience of these sessions for the client team.
- Hosting the workshop day with the Google mobile specialist where we welcomed executives and product teams, shared what we had learned, and facilitated a collaborative session to uncover insights, prioritise fixes, and create an actionable plan.
We shared findings and recommendations with Google and the client within 24 hours to maintain momentum and encourage swift decision making.
How we helped
One of the strongest predictors of customer-centric growth is how well leadership teams understand their customers’ experiences. Mobile Labs gave executives the opportunity to see those experiences firsthand; to feel what their customers feel so they can lead the charge in being more customer centric.
We helped make that happen by designing and facilitating the full Mobile Lab process: from the user research and usability testing through to the collaborative workshops where business leaders co-created practical, measurable improvements.
As part of the wider EMEA programme, we also presented the Customer Centricity Study white paper that came out of the Google Mobile Labs programme, at the Google Think Retail conference in 2022.
The programme inspired dozens of businesses to implement quick UX wins, test new ideas, and embed customer-centred thinking into how they work every day.
