From Two Weeks to Two Days: How Die Presse Accelerated UX Testing with Userbrain
When Die Presse, one of Vienna’s oldest newspapers, hired Codrin Teodor Vulpoiu, they were making a statement. He wasn’t just their first in-house UX designer — he was the person tasked with proving that user experience could sit at the heart of a media company’s product decisions. His first project: building crossword and puzzle games for the newspaper’s digital platform. His challenge: making sure they actually worked for the people who would play them.
Testing Without the Right Setup Slows Everything Down
Before Userbrain, Die Presse had run one early-stage test by publishing a form online — no recordings, no structured protocol, just written responses at the end. Useful as a starting point, but difficult to analyze and impossible to replay.
The bigger problem was finding the right testers. Die Presse needed people who matched their actual audience — readers of a certain age and background, unfamiliar with the new games — and sourcing them internally meant compromising on objectivity. Getting through a full testing cycle could stretch to two weeks or more.
“Finding the right people was very difficult without a proper recruiting tool. Evaluation took hours, and without recordings, it was harder to prove design decisions.”
One Day to Decide, Two Days to Results
Codrin already knew Userbrain. He’d watched Markus, Userbrain’s founder, present the tool at his university. When it came time to select a platform for the puzzle games project, he ran a comparison — features, pricing, return on investment. Userbrain’s €45 per tester pricing made the financial case easy to put in front of management. The fact that Die Presse’s parent company, Styria, also has roots in Graz sealed it. The decision took one day.
From Screener to Sessions in Two Days
Once set up, the process moved fast. Codrin configured his screener to match Die Presse’s target demographic, launched the test, and had 5 completed sessions back within 2 days — each with full screen recordings, task success rates, and time on task. He shared access to the sessions with his team via Userbrain’s invite link, so stakeholders could watch the recordings themselves rather than waiting for a summary.
“There was no arguing. Everyone saw the problems themselves and immediately agreed on next steps.”
One Interaction. Every Tester Struggled. Nobody Saw It Coming.
Before testing, Codrin had prepared a list of hypotheses — design assumptions to confirm or disprove. Userbrain validated many of them. But the most valuable findings were the ones nobody had predicted.
In one of the word games, players could drag letter bubbles to form words. The interaction had seemed natural in design. But every single tester struggled with it. The fix, once surfaced, was clear: when a player releases their drag, the formed word should stay visible rather than disappearing. Without test recordings, that issue might have shipped to real readers.
Other sessions revealed that testers read the game instructions and still didn’t understand how to play — a learnability problem with a concrete fix. By the time Codrin compiled his recommendations, the improvement list had doubled in size compared to his original expert evaluation. More than half of his pre-test hypotheses were directly supported or refuted by the testing data. The rest were discoveries no amount of internal review had flagged.
“Without usability testing, we were just halfway there.”
Testing that once took two weeks ran in two days. The team entered development with a ranked, evidence-backed priority list — each item annotated with how many testers had experienced the issue.
A Non-Negotiable Part of the Process
Die Presse’s management didn’t need convincing twice. After seeing the results, Codrin’s manager was already planning how to demonstrate Userbrain to leadership and roll it out across future projects. What had been a new and unproven process became a permanent fixture.
For a solo UX designer carrying responsibility for an entire company’s digital experience, having real evidence behind every design decision isn’t a luxury. It’s what makes the work defensible, prioritizable, and worth doing.
“Usability testing is the core of our work. Userbrain is the main tool for that. Just try it for one of your tests — you’ll see the return on investment for yourself.”
