Turning your customers' mobile pain points into purposeful experiment design

Mobile has gone from totally overlooked to "mobile-first" everything—and now deserves a starring role in your optimization program. If you aren't including mobile in your experimentation efforts, you're losing customers and money.

Statistics show that mobile traffic represents over half of worldwide online activity. Research indicates that 89% of people are likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on mobile, while nearly half of consumers will avoid repurchasing after a negative mobile interaction.

Identifying Mobile Pain Points

At surefoot, we begin every client engagement with deep customer discovery research. We analyze user tests, session recordings, support transcripts, surveys, NPS scores, and analytics data. We segment customers by device type, location, gender, and browsing behavior to understand the specific challenges each group faces.

Common pain points are then grouped into "buckets" for prioritization. This replaces opinion-based decisions with data-driven insights, giving us clear direction for what to test.

Turning Pain Into Purpose: Three Examples

**Product visibility on mobile homepage**

After identifying that mobile visitors weren't seeing enough product options above the fold, we tested adding products below the hero section. The result: a 3% lift in visits to PDPs, 5% lift in AOV, and a 2.2% lift in revenue.

**Cart functionality**

We introduced "frequently bought together" recommendation widgets with quickshop functionality directly in the cart. This generated a 2.5% lift in cart adds and a 3.4% lift in AOV.

**Checkout clarity**

By streamlining competing calls-to-action in the checkout flow, we achieved a 3.1% uplift in checkout visits, a 3.5% conversion lift, and a 4.5% revenue lift.

Conclusion

Understanding your customers' mobile pain points—then designing targeted experiments around them—is how you maximize the value of your testing program. Stop guessing. Start listening to your mobile customers, and let their struggles guide your experiment roadmap.