OpenLab Usability Study: Making a Community Platform Easier to Navigate on Mobile
Usability, Theory & Practice | Pratt Institute, Spring 2026
A Platform Full of Content That Users Couldn't Quite Reach
OpenLab is an open-source digital platform built for students, faculty, and staff at the New York City College of Technology, better known as City Tech, a technical college in Brooklyn offering 58 associate and baccalaureate programs. The platform hosts courses, clubs, student portfolios, projects, and open educational resources, functioning as a shared community space for the entire college. It is, in theory, the connective tissue of City Tech's academic life.
The operative word is "in theory." A platform can host all the right content and still fail its users if they can't find what they're looking for, can't tell what's clickable, or get no feedback when something goes wrong. Our team was brought in to evaluate exactly that: how real users navigate OpenLab on mobile, where they hit friction, and what specific changes could make the experience more intuitive.
The mobile context mattered. Increasingly, students access platforms like this on their phones, and a site designed primarily for desktop use often carries forward interaction patterns that don't translate: small tap targets, ambiguous labels, carousels with no visible navigation controls. These aren't dramatic failures. They're the kind of small, accumulating friction points that cause users to give up, scroll past important content, or simply lose confidence in a platform they should be able to trust.
Our goal was to identify those friction points with specificity and back each recommendation with observed user behavior.
From Screener to Rainbow Sheet: Building a Reliable Research Method
Our team of four graduate students from Pratt's School of Information conducted nine moderated user testing sessions over two weeks. We chose moderated user testing deliberately: research by Rubin and Chisnell establishes that as few as five moderated sessions can surface the majority of usability issues on a site, and moderated testing gives us access to the reasoning behind behavior, not just the behavior itself. The think-aloud protocol was central to our method; participants were asked to narrate their thought process in real time as they worked through each task, giving us insight into moments of confusion that a click map or heatmap would never capture.
Before testing began, we conducted an internal audit of the mobile site to identify areas worth examining, then consulted with our client to confirm that our proposed tasks reflected actual usage patterns on the platform. The four tasks we designed covered the platform's core use cases: open exploration of the homepage, finding student ePortfolio sites, locating a club in a specific interest area, and searching for a course by department and subject.
Sessions ran 30 to 45 minutes each and were conducted both in-person and over Zoom, with one team member moderating and another taking notes. I served as moderator for my sessions, which meant managing the pace of each task, keeping participants talking through silence, and resisting the urge to redirect when a participant went somewhere unexpected, because those unexpected paths were often the most informative. Screen recordings were captured throughout for review during analysis.
Recruiting the right participants required care. We built a screener questionnaire on Private Panels, Pratt's licensed recruitment software, and distributed it through the Pratt iSchool listserv and through City Tech via student interns. Our screening criteria were specific: participants needed to be currently enrolled in higher education or have completed their highest level of education within the last one to two years. Anyone without post-secondary education or whose degree was more than three to five years in the past was not considered. This kept our sample aligned with the students most likely to actually use OpenLab.
Our nine participants ranged in education level from bachelor's to master's degree, with six currently enrolled and three having finished within the past two years. Five were in Information Experience Design, with others in communication design, environmental science, ecology, and sociology. Eight of the nine had no prior OpenLab experience, which was intentional: we wanted to understand how a new or prospective City Tech student would encounter the platform for the first time, not how a habituated user would navigate around its quirks.
After all sessions were complete, the team convened to analyze findings using a rainbow sheet, a structured analysis tool that maps specific usability issues against the number of participants who encountered each one. This let us move from individual observations to pattern-level findings, separating the issues that affected almost everyone from those that were more incidental. From there, we prioritized four recommendations to present to the client.
The Interface Was Getting in Its Own Way
The big-picture findings from our SUS questionnaire told a story of a platform that most users found learnable but inconsistent. Six out of nine participants did not find OpenLab difficult to use, and six out of nine agreed that most people would learn to use it quickly. But five out of nine did not feel the platform's features were well integrated, which is the tension at the heart of every issue we found: OpenLab has the right content, but the seams between its parts are showing.
The four issues we identified all lived in that gap between what the platform offers and what users could actually access.
The first and most widespread issue was with listing cards for courses and clubs. Participants consistently paused on listing pages, scanning multiple elements before deciding where to click. Several tapped the "Open" badge on course and club cards expecting it to lead somewhere; when nothing happened, they adjusted, but not without confusion and lost time. The "Visit Site" text link was easy to overlook and failed to communicate clearly that it was the primary action. Our recommendation was to replace it with a full-width, high-contrast button labeled "View Course" or "View Club," reframe status tags like "Open" as informational rather than interactive, and streamline card layouts so listings are easier to scan and compare side by side.
The second issue was the homepage carousel. About half of our participants experienced confusion when trying to interact with it. The small, vertically stacked page indicators were difficult to tap on a mobile screen, and the fade transitions between carousel slides provided no clear confirmation that a tap had registered. Several participants described the top of the page as overwhelming, with the login section and carousel running together visually without clear separation. One participant said simply: "I don't know if it automatically changes or not." Our recommendation was to move the carousel indicators to the bottom, add visible left and right arrows, introduce a brief section header ("Welcome to OpenLab"), and add visual breathing room between the login and carousel sections.
The third issue was filter feedback, or the absence of it. When participants applied search filters on course and club listing pages, they received no visible confirmation that the filter had been applied. More than half expressed uncertainty about whether their filter had actually worked. On mobile, there's no way to view the filter panel and the search results simultaneously, so once a user submits a filter and the panel closes, the criteria they selected become invisible. The fix we recommended was simple and established: display the active filter as a dismissible chip at the top of the results page, labeled "Filtering For:" so users can see what's active and remove it directly from the results view without navigating back into the filter panel.
The fourth issue appeared on ePortfolio and club profile pages. Users consistently scrolled past the "Visit Site" link at the top of these pages, missing the primary call to action entirely. Then, scrolling down, they would encounter the "OPEN" badge overlaid on the main image and try to tap it, assuming it was a button. It isn't; it's a status indicator. One participant captured the experience precisely: "I actually missed this whole section up here; visit ePortfolio. I missed that completely. I didn't even notice that was a thing up there." Our recommendation was to convert the "Visit Site" link into a bold, full-width button styled consistently with the redesigned listing cards, and remove the "OPEN" badge from the image, since the open/closed status is already visible in the information table below.
Across all four issues, the pattern was the same: the problem wasn't that OpenLab lacked the right content or the right features. It was that small interface decisions, status labels that looked like buttons, navigation controls too small to tap confidently, filter states that disappeared after submission, were getting in the way of users reaching what was already there.
A Little Friction with A Real Impact
Our team presented findings and mockups to the client and course faculty at Pratt. The reception confirmed that our findings were specific enough to be actionable, which was the goal from the start. Vague feedback ("navigation could be clearer") is easy to dismiss. Specific findings with observed behavior, direct quotes, and redesigned mockups are harder to set aside.
One thing this project reinforced for me is how much damage low-stakes interface choices can do at scale. None of the four issues we found were catastrophic. A user who can't figure out where to click on a listing card will eventually find their way. But on a platform serving thousands of students, many of whom are arriving for the first time and trying to find a class or a club that might genuinely shape their experience at City Tech, that friction has real cost. Confusion erodes trust, and trust is what makes a community platform feel worth using.
If the project were to continue, I would want to test the revised designs with first-year City Tech students specifically, users who are navigating the platform under real conditions, looking for real courses, and who have the most to lose from a confusing first encounter. The recommendations we made are grounded in solid observed behavior, but the best validation would be watching a new student use the redesigned interface and not having to wonder, even for a moment, where to click next.
One note: the brief asks you to emphasize your individual contributions, and the report lists you as a team member but doesn't break out individual roles in detail. I wrote you as moderator and analysis contributor, which are reasonable assumptions given the team structure, but if your specific role was different (note-taker, task designer, mockup contributor), let me know and I'll adjust. I also kept the tone slightly more professional and methodological here than the Money Mirror piece, since this is a usability study rather than a design prototype, and the two case studies should feel distinct on your portfolio.