Care Leavers App - a developer's view

From a developer’s perspective, the term ‘app’ can mean multiple things. Throughout this blog, the apps we will be discussing are mobile apps such as the Care Leavers App available for download from the Google Play Store and App Store. 

The first stage of creating a new Care Leavers App, is the engagement session, in which our inhouse Designer and Project Manager will speak with you and a group of your young people, working together to pick out fonts, colours and icons. We’ll also make sure we know what your young people may dislike in an app and create our designs based on this feedback. 

Once we have completed the consultation session and agreed on the design of your Care Leavers App – the build process can be started. This consists of building all the sections of your app, from the homepage, your Local Offer, any key services you wish to include and setting up the real-time apprenticeships feed. We do this with your bespoke design, accessibility and usability at the forefront of our mind. 

As we are building the Care Leavers App, we will follow best practise and test each section and page guaranteeing the app is accessible and usable from the start. During the build and testing phase we’re checking the colour contrast of text and using special tools that mimic the behaviour of a screen reader. We take special care to focus on cognitive load and avoid creating pages that consist of multiple blocks of text, and ensure the app is not relying on icons or colours when conveying information to your young people. 

Our tech for good initiative, means we want digital to be inclusive and help as many people as we can. We do this by including multiple languages (with over 100 to choose from), allowing young people to translate content. The Care Leavers App can also be viewed with the Open Dyslexic font, helping those with neurodiversity find information they need, in their own way. 

There is a lot of thought and passion that goes into our process when creating apps and the above mentioned is just the beginning of what we must consider in making the Care Leavers Apps the valuable resource they are. 

Once the build process has finished, our developer team will release the app for testing. This is where the wider team will create a list of any issues they have found, for the developer team to fix. We will then launch the app and complete another round of testing. 

“Personally, my favourite part of building the Care Leavers App is putting myself in the users' shoes, spotting any pain points and figuring out how the app can be adapted to help.  I try out various scenarios and make informed decisions so that the tech we use can improve user experience.

Building a Care Leavers App is very rewarding process and encourages everyone to collaborate, make an impact and learn something new to support care experienced young people” - Matea Howard - Front-end Developer