CLIENT

Challenge

Common Sense Media came to us with the goal of transforming its web experience into a lovable mobile app. Parents who have come to rely on Common Sense Media as a tool to navigate today’s complex media landscape have been asking the 20-year-old non-profit for a dedicated app — and a better experience on their phones and tablets. Creating an app was the #1 request from their monthly subscribers.

To match its company values, Common Sense Media wanted the app to be fully accessible and inclusive of the millions of potential users with disabilities.

Solution

When translating web patterns to mobile, we had to carefully consider how users interacted with the website and adapt those patterns to the mobile app, taking into account the smaller screen size and different user behaviors on mobile devices. During our design workshops, we identified the core experience that would drive the success of the app — helping parents easily determine whether a piece of content is appropriate and safe for their family. We prioritized these features into the Minumum Lovable Product:

• Media reviews, including by the Common Sense Media editorial team, complete with quality and age ratings.
• Community reviews from parents and children.
• An intuitive search capability that offers easy discovery.

Other project highlights include:

• Accessibility: Includes screen-reader support, font scaling, contrast-friendly color scheme, and clear, simple UI for navigation.
• Cross-platform Flutter development: Shared code across both iOS and Android apps, reducing the development cost and time to market. This also will reduce the amount of maintenance required across both packages over the lifetime of the app.
• CMS for content reviews and recommendations: Content can be managed and updated at any time via a separate content management system, without updating the app package itself.
• OneTrust integration to manage user privacy and data within the application. Among its features, OneTrust can distinguish between minors and adults, preventing tracking of user data for minors but allowing for certain kinds of marketing for adults.
• Test automation: Allows team to efficiently manage an app over the lifetime, as automation instantly re-tests aspects of an app with each release — saving hours of QA testing with every update.

Results

The app gives parents and families a dedicated tool for their mobile devices to help them navigate today’s complicated digital landscape.

And our client is thrilled with the lovable app we built together:

“We chose ArcTouch to build our app and we have been impressed with their ability to execute our vision,” said Ellen Pack, President of Common Sense. “ArcTouch's commitment to building accessible software aligns perfectly with our values. They’ve been a tremendous partner and created an app that provides an inclusive and enjoyable experience for everyone."