About the study

A custom set of heuristics – or best practices – were developed for the evaluation of mobile websites within specific verticals: retail, travel and finance. These were originally derived from a large-scale mobile website usability evaluation led by Senior UX researcher Jenny Gove for Google in 2014.

Feedback from applying this framework in the 2016 Mobile User Experience (UX) study led to a more vertical-specific approach in 2018, with custom sets developed for retail, travel and finance.

An appropriate user journey was modelled around each site, detailing:

• The context of completing the task
• The reason that they were performing the task
• A task for the user to complete

Google's Lighthouse v2 browser automation tool was used to conduct synthetic (or simulated) testing of website speed on WiFi. The following metrics were measured (weighting):

• First meaningful paint (5)
• First CPU Idle (5)
• Time to Interactive (5)
• Speed Index (1)
• Estimated Input Latency (1)

Of the overall score, 70% is based on vertical-specific usability best practices, and the other 30% is site speed. While the best practices have been broken down for clarity into four usability areas, the score is based on the total result across all usability areas.

Brands were chosen based on data provided by SimilarWeb. They identified the most visited websites in the 12 months before September 2017 in Europe, Middle East and Africa and before December 2018 in Asia-Pacific region. To qualify for inclusion, websites needed to:

1. Be B2C.
2. Have a transactional element. E.g. Users can complete a conversion journey there, including getting quotes from financial aggregators.

Some well-known brands were excluded from the study because they didn't meet the criteria for inclusion. Examples include:

1. Sites which only drive conversion offline via a phone call or shop visit.
2. Meta-search engines which drive conversions on other sites.
3. Branding sites where the bulk of visits are non-transactional.
4. Local transport sites for commuters.

Overview page statistics on mobile consumer behaviour are taken from 'Consumer Barometer' survey by Google and TNS (2017), 'Connected Consumer' survey by Google and TNS (2017) and ‘Getting Things Done on Mobile’ study by Google and Heart+Mind Strategies (2018). To explore this and other data on consumer behaviour visit www.consumerbarometer.com (opens in a new tab).

Some countries were grouped together for presentation of data on this site. The countries included in these groups are:

• Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway and Sweden
• Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam