Oxford Abstracts is a conference management platform. When someone wants to run a conference, they invite speakers to submit their talks on the platform, then manage everything from that first call for papers through to the live event. It is a small team, around 16 people, but a growing one, and it runs on research. Lou Shine, its UX researcher, spends her weeks interviewing the clients who use the product every day.

The Users You Need Most Are the Ones You Can't Recruit

Oxford Abstracts had built something new. Until then, anyone who wanted to create an event had to book a call with the sales team and sit through a demo first. Feedback told the team that requirement was a blocker, so they built a self-onboarding flow that would let people set up an event on their own.

There was just one problem: Lou could not test it with the people she usually relied on.

Her existing clients were experts. They already knew the product inside out, which made them the wrong audience for a first-time onboarding experience. And the conference world has a vocabulary all its own. Before she joined, Lou says, she did not even know what an abstract was, yet you need to know these things to self-onboard. The team tried friends and family and posted on event-planner boards, but the people who knew nothing about conferences got lost, and the boards went quiet. The right testers were exactly the ones Oxford Abstracts had no way to reach.

A Screener Question That Made the Difference

That gap is what pointed Lou to Userbrain. She could set up an unmoderated test, a blind run she could watch back, and put a screener question in front of Userbrain's testers to find people who had submitted to or organized a conference before.

Watching Strangers Meet the Product for the First Time

Lou ran the new flow past eight testers, each one a stranger meeting Oxford Abstracts for the first time through unmoderated remote video. She could watch every hesitation, every misread label, every pause where someone did not know what to do next. As she worked through the recordings, a pattern emerged fast.

The repetition was the point. The same issues surfacing again and again told her these were real problems, not one-off confusion, and that the test had covered the ground.

The Question They Were Asking Twice Without Realizing It

The clearest payoff came from watching people stumble over things the team had stopped being able to see. Reviewing the recordings, Lou pinpointed one example: the flow asked users the same question twice, once during account and event setup and again in a later platform tour, and nobody inside Oxford Abstracts had noticed the redundancy until fresh testers ran into it.

Findings like that turned into a long list of tickets, and the team worked through all of them.

Shipping with Confidence, and a Bigger Role Ahead

For Lou, the real result was not a single fix but how she felt on the other side of testing.

What Lou takes from the project is a way of working she wants to use more widely: inviting her own users directly into tests, watching real customers move through beta features and new releases rather than handing them a checklist.

Results at a Glance