Posted on 22 June 2011
Integrated Marketing, Mobile, Practice Groups
North East law firm Dickinson Dees has just launched a new iPhone app aimed at HR professionals. Although several firms have launched iPhone apps over the past year or so, we believe the new app from Dickinson Dees is the first from a large firm to be aimed at a commercial audience.
Downloading the App
The app is available free from the iTunes store here or by searching for “HR Alert” on the App Store.
Features
The app splits content into three categories:
Calculators
A calculators section provides tool for working out maternity, paternity, and adoption leave, and statutory redundancy entitlements.
News
The news section delivers a selection of news articles by the firm as well as links to news stories of interest on third-party websites.
Directory
The directory gives gives the contact details for partners and directors in the employment team. There is also a directory of all the firm’s heads of teams and a third one giving easy access to maps and contact details for each of the firm’s five regional locations.
First Impressions
Resources in any business are finite and there is a lot to be said in reducing a features set to the point where a high quality product can be delivered. It seems that Dickinson Dees have taken this approach with their HR Alert app and the results is a fairly well polished app for the iPhone.
Closer Inspection
We tried the calculators first and were greeted with a sure-fire sign that we were using a law phone app - the obligatory disclaimer - which requires you to scroll through two screen of text and then click a button marked ‘I understand’. We do indeed understand that an app is no substitute for professional advice, but we’re pretty sure this information could be brought to our attention in a more elegant way.
Once past the disclaimer, the calculators ask you for some basic information about the employee’s situation. After clicking the calculate button, a timeline of important dates is display on screen. Interestingly, there is a lot more useful information available but users need to click a very small button in the top right of the screen in order to access it. Clicking the button flips the screen over to reveal a few pages worth of guidance relating to the way the calculation were made. The is useful information and we are surprised it isn’t made more prominent.
The news section presents headlines in a list format and is easy to use. A marker to the left of each headline indicates whether the story has been read yet on this device, making easy to identify new stories. Clicking on a heading takes you to the full story, or in the case of third-party articles, links through to the article elsewhere on the web.
At the time of this review, the most recent article was published over 2 weeks ago. Apps of this nature are most valuable when they are regularly updated, and we’d advice Dickinson Dees to ensure they have an effective content strategy in place to stop the app going stale.
The directory section is a useful addition and may help to drive some leads to the firm. We would like to see the app make it easier to find lawyers by specialism as those who are new to the phone would find it difficult to pick an individual to find their needs. This would not only help potential client, but organising lawyer by specialism also helps to demonstrate the range of issues the firm can help with.
Further Development
Dickinson Dees have made a good effort at building a simple iPhone app with high production values and useful content. Given that the firm has just relaunched it’s we’d like to see tighter integration and opportunities for generating leads and building a relationship with users. An example would be to offer an enhanced set of calculators to users who sign up on the firm’s website. Building a fan-base of anonymous users may well help to build brand recognition and get the firm on to client’s short list, but building direct relationships with named individuals is likely to results in a higher conversion of users into paying clients.
