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How to design an Apple Design Award-winning app

An in-depth study into recent ADA winners and what they have in common.

Joseph Russell
UX Collective
11 min readOct 23, 2018

Firstly, let me just state that I have personally never won an Apple Design Award (ADA). Not many people have. In fact, the highly prestigious award is only presented to a handful of app designers and developers from around the world at Apple’s WWDC event each year.

For a mobile designer, winning an ADA trophy with its crisp aluminium body and touch-activated glowing Apple logo represents the pinnacle of design achievement. In Apple’s own words, the ADA’s recognise the “creative artistry and technical achievements of developers who reflect the best in design, innovation and technology on Apple platforms.”

So what does it take to end up on the receiving end of one of these coveted accolades? As the creative director and co-founder of a successful app development agency, I was more than a little bit curious to find out.

When the 2018 ADAs were recently announced, I decided to stop puzzling over Apple’s picks and look for answers in the data.

By analysing all of the winning apps over the last five years perhaps I could uncover the secret recipe for designing an ADA-winning…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Joseph Russell

Award-winning app designer and founder of app design agency dreamwalk.com.au

Responses (7)

What are your thoughts?

Love the interpretation

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Design is more than static screenshots.
I applaud your effort but came away a bit disappointed in what you skipped.
You didn’t mention use of animation in the interfaces — subtle animations in icons and transitions may make the difference between a…

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Great analysis! I think the majority of these apps also do a great job with onboarding new users. It’s a critical component that’s really hard to do well.

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