The Hobart Spotlight for iPad empowers enterprise sales teams with a synchronized product catalog and a customer relationship management tool that doubles as a tradeshow presentation kiosk. Updating automatically, the app showcases the full line of Hobart industrial kitchen appliances with high-quality photography and video.
We blended native iOS elements with HTML5 for a rich app experience that allowed the client to repurpose existing assets and publish new content themselves.
This feature allowed company reps to easily hide confidential material for public audiences — but then switch back when meeting with potential customers behind closed doors.
The app's content — powered by a back-end content management system — updates automatically when launched and connected to a network. But it also works in offline mode.
Strict design requirements combined with only six-weeks lead time made building out every Hobart product screen in native iOS format impractical. As a further challenge, the app had to work offline, but its video elements pushed the file size near a gigabyte—above current App Store limits.
Embedding HTML5 pages that mimicked iOS style produced a design that felt native, but which slashed the installation file size. Videos and other non-essentials were triggered to download and cache in the background when the app opened and the device was connected. Integrating HTML5 elements also vastly accelerated development time. ArcTouch delivered all the product pages in days, not weeks.
The Hobart Spotlight was named the AdAge Best B2B Mobile App.
