This paper describes collaborative work between industry and academia aimed at supporting the design and assessment of a transcoding service to support mobile phone internet browsing. The work demonstrates how research informed by user based assessment can be effectively and efficiently employed to inform and support industry. The paper describes a series of small scale, relatively rapid, evaluation studies that have focused on the comparative assessment of alternative transcoding approaches. These studies have: informed the design of OpenWeb transcoding; developed a number of easily efficient empirical assessment methods for mobile browsing; and provided a basis for focusing future user experience studies. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Evaluation/methodology, User-centered