An internal app for National Shipping employees, including crew at sea

National Shipping has staff in offices and crew who spend weeks on board, away from any internal network.

Internal communication that lives on a corporate intranet excludes exactly the people who are hardest to reach, and that is most of a shipping company.

Everything ran through informal, scattered channels.

• A split workforce: office staff and crew, with different access to everything.
• No single channel: news, calendar and benefits circulated wherever they could.
• Onboarding the whole headcount: giving every employee access, not just the ones with a corporate email.

A channel that half the company cannot open is not an internal channel.

We built the internal channel as a mobile app, because the phone is the only device the entire workforce carries, on land or at sea.

Four spaces, one channel

• Internal news blog with images, so a company announcement looks like one.
• Birthdays section, company calendar and an employee benefits space.

Getting everyone in

• Per user access with bulk onboarding by employee number, from a spreadsheet.
• Full headcount covered from day one, with no manual sign up.

The brand, actually applied

• Interface refined over successive rounds through 2019 until it matched the brand manual.
• Typography, palette, logo, iconography and buttons unified across every screen.
• Eleven iterations, because applying a brand manual to an app is more than adding the logo.

Architecture and technology

• Android and iOS app with per user access and bulk onboarding by employee number.
• A how to guide handed to the client team so they publish and maintain content on their own.

Learn more about mobile app development.

The company got an internal channel its own team runs.

Starting point

• Internal communication through informal, scattered channels.
• No channel reaching crew away from the office.

What was achieved

• Android and iOS app with news, calendar, birthdays and benefits.
• Per user access with bulk onboarding by employee number.
• Interface aligned with the brand manual over eleven iterations.
• Content published and maintained by the client team, with a written guide.

Strategic impact

• Choosing the phone as the platform is what makes the channel reach the whole company.
• Handing over the guide is what keeps the app alive after the project ends.