German publisher Wooga has built its games business on Facebook.

But with social mobile growing fast, it knew it had to bring its titles to smartphones and tablets too.

That's what product manager Teemu Haila was talking about at Nordic Game in the context bringing key game Diamond Dash to iOS.

Looking better

Obviously, the key element to redesign was the user interface.

"It needed to be usable by everyone and feel natural on the device," Haila said.

The process for this was to immediately start testing, even when the design was just a paper mock up. The result of this highly iterative process is that first thing you see when you launch the game is your friends list, which establishes the social element.

Wooga also focused on the game's tutorial, using metrics to check where people were having problems.

When it thought the game was ready, there was a soft launch of a minimum viable product version for iPhone in Canada in November 2011.

Ironically, though, while Wooga wanted to keep the launch fairly quiet to tweak the gameplay, Apple Canada featured the game.

Get connected

Perhaps the biggest step in development was when the 1.3 version was released in late 2011.

This is what Haila called the viable product. As significant as the new content and UI tweaks, Wooga worked to get more people logging into Facebook to make the most of virality opportunities.

"Previously we had around 28 percent of users logging in. That's just not enough," Haila said.

The incentives - such as new lives and soft currency - have pushed this to over 60 percent.

Long haul

More generally, as the company has continued to update the game, also adding hard currency items, Diamond Dash has continued to rise up the top grossing charts. It's now constantly in the US top 100.

"Mobile is now a sustainable business for us," Haila said. "We're in this for the long run."

And, thanks to the main development for Diamond Dash being handled by a separate Flash development team (the code bases are also separate), only three people at any one time have been working on the iOS version.

However, over 100 people have worked on the project at some point.