The Challenge

The Major League Baseball Players Association is the collective bargaining representative for all professional baseball players of the thirty Major League Baseball teams. The MLBPA was created to protect and advance the rights of the Players through the collective bargaining process.

Every day, important union-related resources are needed by players and information needs to be pushed their way by the MLBPA. In an increasingly mobile world, players use tablets and smartphones on a daily basis, constantly connecting to their latest feeds. As a result, the prime directive was to build compelling smartphone and tablet apps that communicate personalized messages. To accommodate baseball players' device preferences, we needed to support multiple operating systems from iOS to Android and Windows Phone.

The Approach

From the start, MLBPA and Icreon worked at a breakneck pace to develop the players app. We started out by understanding the most desired features of the players - from retrieving the latest information, to looking up team schedules, to bookmarking specific players’ rights. We then worked together to launch an app that could essentially serve as a player's digital resource center.

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The Solution

With multiple apps to be built, we broke out into an agile development cycle. Because application performance was a concern, the team worked strictly on native code, building out 5 separate applications to accommodate the many smartphones and operating systems used by players.