When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, businesses everywhere had to adapt quickly. Businesses in heavily populated cities especially.
01The 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 designed, prototyped, built, tested, and launched Passport, an app that keeps tenants safe while delivering on Beacon's brand promise.
weeks. plural, but barely. →
02Tech Stack
Speed came first, so we didn't start with the app stores. We had already shipped several pandemic products and knew that getting even a legitimate app approved by Apple and Google could take weeks. Starting on the web meant we could launch right away, then test and push updates the same day as feedback came in from tenants who were already back in their offices.
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 with Airtable. This let us iterate quickly on the data model. Airtable's straightforward API set us up nicely when we decided to build native apps for iOS and Android: we reused the same API and data model, which saved a lot of time and let us 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, reminding tenants to fill out the daily health survey as they arrived.
03Premium, but fast
Tenant interviews shaped the details. Your pass pops up on its own as you get close to the office, so nobody is fumbling with their phone at the door. On-site testing turned up a bottleneck at security, so each day got its own color, which let guards check a pass from across the lobby. The copy explained clearly that the data is anonymous and no personal information is stored, and lobby signs with QR codes got visitors set up quickly.
“From start to finish, the Upstatement 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.”