When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, businesses everywhere had to adapt quickly. Businesses in heavy populated cities especially.

The Problem

How does a company that manages office buildings in large cities get people back to work?

Beacon Capital Partners manages high-end office space across the country and is known for giving its tenants best-in-class treatment. So our back-to-work app had to deliver an exceptional product experience — and do it fast. Within a matter of weeks, we rapidly designed, prototyped, built, tested, and launched Passport, an app that keeps tenants safe while delivering on Beacon's brand promise.

Tech Stack

The first version of our app was built as a PWA using React for the front-end. For the backend, we needed something easy for the client to manage and given the data needs weren't large, we went Airtable. This allowed us to quickly iterate on the data model

Luckily, Airtable has a straightforward API that we could use to pull data into the app. This set us up nicely when we decided to build native apps for iOS and Android. We were able to reuse the same API and data model, which saved us a lot of time and allowed us to save data offline.

As we built the native app, we needed a way to send a push notification to users when they approached a building. At the time, this wasn't possible out of the box with React Native, so we built a small native module in Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android. This allowed us to send notifications to users when they approached their building, reminding them to fill out the daily health survey.

Testimonial

From start to finish, the team was an absolute pleasure to work with and had a best-in-class product up and running for us in a matter of weeks.

-- Simon Yeo, Beacon Capital Partners