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The winners of the 2020 Apple Design Awards

The winners of the 2020 Apple Design Awards

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Highlight

Apple notified the 2020 Apple Design Awards winners via remote call and presented their choices on storytelling, inclusivity, creative tools, and cross-platform experiences to developers.

Core Content

In 2020, Apple will not be able to present the Apple Design Awards live at WWDC. John Geleynse opened by saying the team still wanted to do it in a very personal way. As a result, the session turned into a set of remote calls: Lauren Grimm first chatted with the developers about their work, and then John joined the call to tell them that they had won the award.

This video does not have the structure of a regular feature introduction. It focuses on how winning teams define their products. Where Cards Fall tells a grounded and personal story. Sky wants to evoke the brighter side of humanity. Another abstract game that hopes to become more understandable over time. Simon Flesser mentioned that they want to make the cast of characters more inclusive and make the work more accessible to more people.

The answer for authoring tools is more direct. Looom is described as an instrument for creating hand-drawn animations. David William Hearn says the goal of music notation tools is simple: to make notation extremely easy. Darkroom wants photographers to forget they’re using a photo editing app and focus back on the story they want to tell. Shapr3D aims to be the 3D design tool for the next twenty or thirty years.

Announcing the award, John said these developers have become people on whose shoulders other developers can stand. At the end, several developers said the same thing: the product is often not beautiful in the early stage, but if you know it needs to exist, you must continue to polish it until it can be felt by others.

Detailed Content

Personal connections must also be retained for remote awarding

(00:02) John will first explain the background: Every year WWDC uses the Apple Design Award to recognize developers. Not being able to do it in person in 2020, Apple still wanted to complete notifications in a very personal way. This explains the format of the entire video: the award announcement happens during a developer call, and the camera captures their immediate reactions.

Key points:

-The awards still take place during WWDC.

  • The notification method changes from on-site to remote call.
  • The video uses the developer’s immediate reaction as the main content.

Ask about the work first, then announce the award

(00:18) Lauren Grimm enters the conversation as an Apple design evangelist, and her first question is “What’s unique about your app?” This question first asks each team to describe the core of the design in one sentence, and the feature list is moved to the back.

Key points:

  • The answer to Where Cards Fall falls on personal narrative.
  • Sky’s answer falls on the bright side of human nature.
  • Simon Flesser’s answer falls on Inclusive Role Casting.
  • These answers all define the experience goals first, and then let the functions serve the goals.

For tool-based apps, the tools should be pushed to the back

(00:51) The answers from Looom, music notation tools, Darkroom, and Shapr3D all revolve around the creative process. Looom makes hand-drawn animation tools into instruments. Music notation tools pursue an extremely easy notation experience. Darkroom wants photographers to forget they are in an editing interface and focus on the story. Shapr3D’s goal is to define the 3D design tools of the next twenty to thirty years.

Key points:

  • The core of a creative tool is to allow people to enter the creative state faster, and the number of controls is just a means.
  • Darkroom’s statement gives a clear acceptance criterion: users ultimately remember the photo story, and the editing process recedes into the background.
  • The goals of Shapr3D indicate that professional tools also require long-term product judgment and cannot only satisfy the current workflow.

Good works usually don’t look good in the early stage

(02:22) Majd Taby said that everyone is still learning and pursuing an ideal that can never be fully achieved. Sam Rosenthal went on to say that the team worked hard to make something beautiful exist; in the early days it wasn’t pretty, but it needed to convince others that it would be valuable.

Key points:

  • This paragraph describes design quality as a long-term pursuit and avoids one-time list thinking.
  • “It’s not pretty in the early stages” gives the product team a realistic reminder: protect the core experience during the prototype stage and don’t just judge based on the first look.
  • Eran Hilleli mentioned that when you make something with a lot of love and users experience it, that connection will be ignited again; the emotion of the work comes from the experience after continuous polishing, and the copywriting is just a supplement.

Resources point to the design baselines for the four platforms

(02:42) There are no code snippets in this video. Official Resources provides access to Human Interface Guidelines for iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. For developers, these links are more like landing paths beyond award-winning works: first understand the interactive context of each platform, and then decide how your app should behave.

Key points:

  • There are corresponding design materials for iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
  • This is consistent with the scope of the winning entries: the Apple Design Awards are for apps and games across all Apple platforms.
  • If you want to review your own product, first check the navigation, input methods, readability and core tasks according to the target platform. Do not directly copy the visual style of an award-winning work.

Core Takeaways

  • Do an “Experience Sentence” audit: Have the team write a sentence of goals for each core feature that users can feel. Why it’s worth doing: In this video, each winning team first talks about the uniqueness of their work, such as personal narrative, inclusiveness, easy notation, or focus on photo stories. How to get started: List the three most frequent tasks, rewrite buttons and processes as user outcomes, and delete entries that don’t support those outcomes.

  • Keep creative tools out when it counts: Design an immersive mode for photo, animation, music or 3D editing apps. Why it’s worth it: Darkroom’s goal is to make photographers forget about editing in the app. Looom describes the animation tool as an instrument. How to start: Find the most commonly used continuous action in the creative process, reduce panel switching, and put preview, undo and completion actions on the same screen.

  • Turn inclusivity into your content production process: Build inclusivity checks into roles, examples, templates, and empty states. Why it’s worth doing: Simon Flesser clearly mentioned that he wanted an inclusive cast to make the work approachable to more people. How to get started: Add pre-publish checks for new assets, covering character presentation, text tone, color dependencies, and accessibility settings.

  • Create a HIG comparison table for each platform: Turn the official design resources of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS into design QA within the team. Why it’s worth doing: Resources points to the Human Interface Guidelines of four platforms at the same time, explaining that the experience of the winning works needs to be returned to the platform context. How to start: List navigation, input, text, focus, remote control or watch short tasks and other check items by platform, and review them one by one before publishing.

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