If you are like us when we started 3 years ago, you have no idea about user interface (UI), user flow, usability, and specifically about iPhone UI design and experience. So what to do when you sit in front of a blank paper, about to design the look and fell of your app interface? Because, first of all, you must sit in front of that blank paper! Don't skip this step and just start coding, it's very important.

"Just how do I design if not with prototyping? An excellent question. The short answer is 'on paper'."

- Alan Cooper ("Father of Visual Basic")

Note: this blog post applies to any non-gaming applications: there the story is much different and we won't cover here.

One of the main question we get asked is "Why did you pick Social Networking category to develop your first app?"
Fair question at the end. Based on our background, mostly high tech enterprise either as product managers or engineers, social networking was really out of our scope, knowledge and experience. We never built a consumer product, never designed its user interface, never defined its user flow. We should have at least picked a category we knew better, maybe business, utility, productivity, just to limit the variables of the failure equation, right? No... we did pick Social Networking. And on purpose.

Why did the iSocialize team decided to start a blog? We have been developing iSocialize iPhone app for almost two years now, in our little spare time, and the app has turned out to be a pretty successful one:
- Always in Top 25 social networking apps since we launched, Top 10 for over a year now
- Reached position #2 in our category and Top 100 in the overall US chart
- Awarded of the Best App Ever Award in 2009
- Nominated as “Top 10 best Social Networking app” of 2010 for iTunes Rewind 2010 campaign
- Featured by Apple as “All-Time Top Paid app” for 10 billionth app download campaign
- Various press coverage and awards