Bonfire Studios is a 15-person digital agency in the greater Boston area whose bread and butter is website design and development. Michelle Lorenti works on the strategy side, and on a redesign her job comes before anyone opens a design file: work out what is actually wrong with the current experience, so the new one solves real problems instead of inherited assumptions.

A Year-Long Contract for a Few Weeks of Research

The obstacle was never whether user testing was worth doing. It was how testing platforms wanted to be paid.

Bonfire had used UserTesting.com years earlier, when it was more affordable, and Maze after that, back when Maze still offered a monthly plan. Then the pricing model changed and the annual lock-in arrived. For an agency of 15 people whose research needs arrive project by project, that math never works.

Michelle found Userbrain while researching options for a client project, and the flexibility was the unlock. Testing stopped being an annual commitment to justify and became something the team could switch on for the projects that genuinely call for it, especially the complex login and subscription based products where user input matters most.

Two Groups of Users, One Missing Perspective

The project was a homepage and signup redesign for a gift registry platform, a login-based product that has had a strong following for over a decade. Bonfire split the research into two audiences. For existing users, they ran interviews with the client's own customer base. To gain a new perspective from people who had never had a touchpoint with the product, they used Userbrain's tester panel: people who had never had a single touchpoint with the product.

These sessions presented an important opportunity to answer key questions that will later inform the website's user journey. What is your first impression? What do you think this platform does? The answers reshaped the messaging. Then testers walked through signing up and adding gifts to a list, while Michelle and a colleague watched how intuitive the flow actually was.

The Password Field That Was Turning People Away

Then came the finding that justified the whole exercise.

To create an account, users had to choose a password containing a capital letter, a number, and a symbol. The form never said so. There was no requirements hint under the field. In session after session, testers tried, failed, and could not work out why.

It sat at the single most expensive point in the product, the moment a new user commits. Michelle made it one of the headline call-outs in her report. The client agreed immediately, and the fix is going into the new design.

That is the pattern Michelle now looks for in every test: the small thing everyone stopped seeing.

From 15-Minute Videos to the Points That Matter

Bonfire delivers findings as a summary deck, backed by a folder of the recordings so the client can watch for themselves. Getting from raw sessions to that deck used to be the slow part.

AI Insights surfaces the themes, and the sentiment view tells Michelle where to look hardest: when a negative moment shows up, she goes straight to that section of the session and watches it properly. Her colleague used Ask Userbrain to pull key takeaways per user type for the presentation. The deck the client saw was built from evidence, not impressions, and it took a fraction of the time.

Small Insights, Prioritized and Shipped

The findings became a master list, prioritized with the client and carried into design and development. Some points confirmed suspicions the client already had. Others were things nobody in the room had considered.

Results at a Glance