Rotten Tomatoes Mobile App

Overview

On the Rotten Tomatoes mobile app, I worked with a growing product and design team to refine the UI quality and improve several core UX flows—including registration and information architecture—to support a larger strategic goal: keeping users engaged inside the Rotten Tomatoes ecosystem.

While Rotten Tomatoes has strong top-of-funnel value for movie and TV discovery, much of that usage risked being transactional: users would check a score, decide what to watch, and leave. This work focused on transforming the app into more of a destination—encouraging deeper exploration, repeat sessions, and more opportunities for ad impressions and partner click-throughs to Fandango At Home and Fandango partners.

Role & Scope

The Problem

Users trusted Rotten Tomatoes for ratings and reviews—but the mobile experience often encouraged short, single-purpose visits.

From a product and business standpoint, the challenges were:

• Low session depth (few screens per visit)
• Limited repeat engagement
• Missed opportunities to guide users from discovery → intent → action

Key Contributions

1. UI Refinement Across Core Surfaces

As features and content expanded, UI consistency and clarity became increasingly important—especially on high-traffic views such as:

• Discover / browsing feeds
• Search results and filters
• Movie and TV detail pages
• Reviews and user-driven modules

I focused on tightening:

• Visual hierarchy and readability across dense content
• Consistency in components and layout patterns
• Interaction details that affected perceived performance (scroll behavior, overlays, navigation states)

These refinements helped the app feel cohesive and intentionally designed, even as new features were introduced.

2. Registration & Onboarding Improvements

To support social features and personalized experiences, users needed a smoother and more intentional path to account creation.

I contributed to UX improvements that:

• Introduced clearer registration entry points tied to meaningful actions
• Reduced friction in the sign-up flow to prevent abandonment
• Better communicated the value of creating an account

The goal was to make registration feel like a natural extension of engagement—not a forced interruption.

3. Information Architecture Enhancements

A major lever for retention in media apps is what happens after the first interaction. I helped refine the app's information architecture to encourage continued exploration rather than dead ends.

This work focused on:

• Improving navigation between movies, TV, people, users, and publications
• Creating clearer pathways between discovery and detail views
• Ordering and grouping information to support scanning and browsing

The result was a more connected experience that encouraged users to keep moving through the app.

4. Supporting Social & Community Behaviors

To increase stickiness, the product leaned into lightweight social and community features—giving users reasons to return beyond a single rating lookup.

The UI and UX work supported engagement loops such as:

• Writing and interacting with reviews
• Saving content and managing "My Stuff"
• Discovering people, users, and publications through search

These behaviors helped shift usage from one-off visits toward ongoing engagement.

Why This Worked

The improvements were not just about visual polish—they supported a behavioral shift:

By improving UI clarity, reducing friction in key flows, and strengthening how content connected across the app, Rotten Tomatoes became more of a place users could stay—benefiting both users and the broader ecosystem.

Design System (Secondary Enabler)

As UI changes scaled across many screens and states, I helped introduce a token-based design approach to support consistency and speed.

This system:

• Made visual decisions reusable across the app
• Reduced one-off styling and visual drift
• Improved alignment between design and engineering

The design system was not the primary goal—it served as an enabler that made UX and UI improvements repeatable and scalable.

Impact

• 4.4★ rating on the Apple App Store with ~10k reviews (as last reported)
• ~20k installs at the time of last reporting
• Improved UI consistency across core product surfaces
• Stronger foundation for scaling engagement and monetization features