Accommodation for Students helps students from around the world find somewhere to live while they study in the UK. That means serving two very different audiences on the same platform, students searching and landlords listing, and it means the product is genuinely complex. Ally Collins is the researcher responsible for understanding how people actually move through it.

Order Out of Chaos, and Not Enough Hours to Find It

Ally's instinct for the work is what drew her to research in the first place.

The constraint was never appetite. It was time. Before user testing was part of the workflow at AFS, product decisions were made without evidence coming straight from users, because getting that evidence the manual way meant finding participants, scheduling sessions, running them, and then working through the footage. Days, sometimes weeks, for one question.

There was a second gap too, and it is one most product teams live with quietly. The people building the product almost never watch anyone use it.

Results Back Before the Afternoon Is Over

A Userbrain account was already in place when Ally joined. She had seen the platform before, but running tests on it herself was a different experience.

Recruiting participants, once the single biggest obstacle between a question and an answer, stopped being a project of its own. Work that used to fill a week now fits inside an afternoon.

The knock-on effect mattered more than the time saved. Because setting up a test is straightforward, testing at AFS is no longer something only a trained researcher can do. Colleagues without a research background can run one themselves, which means research capacity is no longer capped by one person's calendar.

Getting the Whole Team to Sit In

The turning point came while Ally was testing a full journey, from landing page through to inquiry. Rather than summarizing what she had found and asking people to take her word for it, she cut the moments that mattered into Clips and shared them across the design and development teams. Everyone watched real users hesitate, get confused, and occasionally light up.

What changed was the nature of the conversation afterward. A finding presented as a researcher's conclusion invites debate. A clip of a student getting stuck does not. The team moved from arguing about what users probably wanted to agreeing on what they had all just watched happen, which is a much shorter route to a decision.

Prioritizing With Evidence Instead of Opinion

Testing is now built into how AFS decides what to work on. Prototypes get tested before code gets written, so the expensive rework happens on a design instead of on a release. Roadmap decisions carry evidence behind them, which makes them easier to make and easier to defend.

Ally's advice to teams wondering whether it is worth starting is characteristically direct.

For Ally and the team at AFS, Userbrain is less a testing tool than the thing that keeps a fast-moving product team pointed at the students it is built for.

Results at a Glance