Modus Create: Seeing in Color with Ionic Enterprise

Color Blindness affects over 300 million people around the world. The most popular way to test for it is the Ishihara Test, created by Japanese ophthalmology researcher Shinobu Ishihara in 1917. 

The test involves looking at a series of circles, each made up of colored dots, with a letter or number formed in the middle. The tests help diagnose several types of color blindness, and can be a powerful tool for self diagnosis and proactive treatment. 

Modus Create is a digital consulting firm and an Ionic platinum partner that helps enterprises build cross-platform digital experiences. Their team felt that the Ishihara Test could use a 21st century update - a mobile app, specifically. 

And they set out to create it in just six weeks. 

The Challenge:

The team needed to create a proof of concept app from scratch under a tight deadline. That meant they had to do everything from developing the product strategy through end-to-end development and release in just 42 days. They needed a solution that would allow their distributed team to work asynchronously, iterate quickly, and make incremental improvements as needed, all while maintaining brand consistency in the final product. This couldn’t just look like any online test - it had to feel like a Modus Create app.

The Solution:

The Modus Create team turned to Ionic and Stencil to create an app that would be available on both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. Ionic empowered the team to use their existing knowledge of JavaScript to create a smooth native user experience (and a great web application), without needing to learn a new coding language. 

Ionic empowered us to use our existing expertise around the JavaScript ecosystem to create a smooth native user experience for Google and Apple’s operating systems.

Wesley Fuchter, Manager, Full-Stack Engineering

Using Stencil, Ionic’s tool for building scalable design systems, the team was able to leverage various JavaScript libraries to build the components of their app. By allowing the ReactJS engineers to write JSX code they were already familiar with, Stencil generated the UI components that Ionic would use to build the iOS and Android user interface. 

Modus Create then leveraged an AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) framework to configure a set of lambdas and storage buckets to generate the Ishihara Test images. Then, they exposed an API Gateway where the mobile app could authenticate and consume the Ishihara images and show them to users.

The Result:

Leveraging Ionic’s many capabilities, Modus Create was able to take their app from ideation to app store in just six weeks.. They built a polished proof of concept to help diagnose color blindness.The app features a clean, simple interface in Modus Create’s branding, with various color deficiency tests that automatically make up comprehensive color blindness screens. 

Utilizing various tools, the distributed team was able to collaborate asynchronously to build the application in record time. Now, the Ishihara app is available to people  around the globe on App Store and Google Play. View the web version here.

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