A&O Arbeidsapp
Allen&Overy's Employment contract on mobile
Building the default employment contract template as a native iPhone app.
For the Dutch offices of the international law firm Allen & Overy I developed an iPhone app showcasing their standard employment contract. And to author the content of this app and its non-linear navigation, a special backend was made.
The Dutch employment department of Allen & Overy wanted a native iPhone app to read and browse their standard employment contract. All the content of the app could have been simple (hyper)text and no special iOS features seemed necessary, so theoretically the app could have been made just a web app.
However, a requirement was also to have the app work when no network connection was available. And the content needed to be loaded much faster than possible with a web app. Therefore we chose to develop a native iOS app, taking advantage of Core Data and all of its performance benefits.
The biggest challenge of this project was to allow the client to author their content and create a consistent corpus of articles and references. As lawyers are very used to writing lengthy linear pieces of text, in which every aspect of the case is unambiguously described in detail, they are less experienced in authoring hypertext in which paragraphs function as much more autonomous blocks and cross references are used to navigate between them.
So, despite the fact that all content would be static and didn’t need to be updated after the app was released, I started this project by developing a special backend to which the client could log in, and author the content. It was partly mimicking an iPhone simulator in the backend so the final navigation of the content in the app could be experienced as much as possible. And of course I also included validation in the backend to prevent the client from accidentally creating broken links.
For the second version I made the app universal, so it runs well on both iPhone and iPad, with the table of contents and the glossary in the sidebar.
The app is no longer accessible in the App Store.
