From 3 Months to Same-Day Feedback: How Wüstenrot Sped Up UX Testing with Userbrain
Wüstenrot built its name as an Austrian building society, but that's no longer the full picture. Today it operates as an all-finance provider: banking, insurance, and financing products under one roof, competing against players with far bigger teams and far fewer regulatory constraints.
In a market where customers hand over sensitive financial decisions and expect to feel secure doing it, Marlies Novak and her three-person UX team carry the job of making sure Wüstenrot's digital products, above all its app, hold up to that trust.
Sitting on Hot Coals While an Agency Tests Your Product
Before Userbrain, testing at Wüstenrot ran through external agencies. It worked, but it was slow. Agencies had to be onboarded into a business as specific as finance before they could even start, walked through products, terminology, and context they had no prior exposure to.
Getting through that onboarding and back out the other side with results routinely took two to three months for a full test cycle.
"You're sitting on hot coals, because of course you want to get results faster."
Outsourcing had taken real work off the team's plate - but it came at the cost of speed. And one thing was clear: the onboarding phase is more than setup effort – the deep product understanding it builds is exactly what the concept work after testing depends on. Knowledge that essential had to live inside the team. The decision for Userbrain was a step toward the product depth and speed a small UX team in a fast-moving organization needs every day.
A Tool from University Makes Its Way Into the Company
Marlies first encountered Userbrain during her master's studies at FH Technikum, where she was deepening her focus on UX research. She saw firsthand how quickly the tool produced usable feedback and how little friction stood between having a question and getting an answer.
Convinced it could solve the exact bottleneck she was fighting at work, she brought the case to her manager, and got the green light to bring Userbrain into Wüstenrot.
Figma to Feedback, Often on the Same Day
The change in speed was immediate. Pilot tests come back with feedback the same day they go live, and most full test rounds are wrapped within a day or two.
By the time Marlies has prepared, run, and evaluated a test, a complete cycle, from question to design decision, takes about a week if she moves quickly. That's a fraction of what a single agency-run test used to cost in time alone.
Most of what Marlies tests today are Figma prototypes, connected directly to Userbrain so testers can navigate through actual product flows rather than a static mockup on a screen-share call.
Being able to run a mobile test matters too. Mobile and desktop behavior often diverge, and Wüstenrot needs to see both. When writing test tasks, she leans on Userbrain's test templates to structure her first questions and on the platform's AI features to sharpen ambiguous wording before a test ever goes live.
That speed has also opened the door to testing kinds of questions an agency relationship never made practical: quick wording checks, small interaction tweaks, run and resolved before they can pile up into a bigger, slower project.
The Filter Nobody on the Team Trusted
The clearest example came while Wüstenrot's team was redesigning the dashboard of its app, the screen all customers land on first.
One design decision split opinion internally: a product filtering option on the dashboard. Based on moderated desktop sessions Marlies had run herself, almost nobody used or even noticed the filter. The team's working assumption was to cut it.
Before making that call, they ran an unmoderated mobile test through Userbrain.
"The Userbrain tests showed us that this filter option was used intensively on mobile and perceived as genuinely helpful."
The mobile result flatly contradicted the desktop sessions. Had the team gone with what they'd seen on desktop alone, the filter would have been removed from a feature customers actually relied on.
"If we hadn't had those insights, we probably would have said, let's cut the filter. Decisions like that show the real value of Userbrain: the best insights are often the ones nobody on the team expected."
A Case the Whole Company Is Starting to Hear
The win reframed how Marlies talks about testing internally. Rather than pitching it as a UX metric, she now makes the case in terms the rest of the company already listens to: time and money.
Testing early means Wüstenrot avoids building features customers don't want or don't understand. That's a cost saved before it's ever incurred, and it's the argument she's using to secure more resources for testing going forward.
That case is already spreading. A second team at Wüstenrot, responsible for internal systems and the online account application flow, has started running its own Userbrain tests after seeing what Marlies's team built.
The company has also begun testing with its own users internally, sending Userbrain links directly to employees for products where staff are the actual end users. Outside the company, Marlies has recommended Userbrain to former classmates and other UX professionals in her network, several of whom she's since found are already using it themselves.
"I've recommended the tool to others in the industry more than once. It's simply that efficient and saves us so much time."
Results at a Glance
| Before | With Userbrain | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first results | 2–3 months (agency) | Same day |
| Full test-to-decision cycle | 2–3 months | ~1 week |
| Who can run tests | Outsourced to agencies | 2 in-house teams, self-serve |
| Test types | Agency-moderated only | Unmoderated + moderated, prototypes, employee tests |
