Here’s the story of how some little bears led their creators straight to an Apple Design Award.
Bear gratitude is a warm and welcoming title developed by the Australian husband-and-wife team of Isuru Wanasinghe and Nayomi Hettiarachchi.
Journaling apps just don’t get much cuter: With prompts like “Today isn’t over,” “I’m literally a new me,” and “Compliment someone,” the Swift-built app and its simple hand-drawn mascot encourage people to get into the habit, celebrate accomplishments, promote introspection, and build gratitude. “And gratitude doesn’t have to be about big moments like birthdays or anniversaries,” says Wanasinghe. “It can be as simple as drinking a hot cup of coffee in the morning.”
ADA FACT SHEET
Bear gratitude
- Winner: Joy and fun
- Available at: iOS, iPadOS, macOS
- Team Size: 2
Download Bears Gratitude from the App Store
Wanasinghe is a long-time programmer who has been running an after-school tutoring center in Sydney, Australia for almost a decade. But the real spark for Bear gratitude and his predecessor, Bears Countdown.
Wanasinghe is more direct. “Art is at the heart of everything we do,” he says.
Bear gratitude was developed by the Australian husband-and-wife team of Isuru Wanasinghe and Nayomi Hettiarachchi.
In fact, art is the whole reason the app exists. As the pandemic piled up months into the drawings, Hettiarachchi and Wanasinghe became increasingly attached to their cartoon creations, enough that they began to consider how to share them with the world. The usual social media routes beckoned, but given Wanasinghe’s background, the idea of an app offered a stronger pull.
“In many cases, you get an idea, put together a design, and then do the actual development,” he says. “In our case, it’s the other way around. The art drives everything.”
Art is at the heart of everything we do.
Isuru Wanasinghe, Bear gratitude co-founder
With hundreds of drawings at their disposal, the pair began to think about the types of apps they could host. Her first release was Bears Countdownwho employed the drawings to help people look at birthdays, holidays and other marquee moments. countdown was never intended to be a mass-market app; the pair didn’t even check its launch stats in App Store Connect. “We would have been excited to have 100 people enjoy what Nayomi drew,” says Wanasinghe. “That’s where our heads were.”
May countdown caught up with some influencers and became enough of a success that the couple started thinking about the next steps. “We thought, well, we’ve given people a way to look forward,” says Wanasinghe. “How about reflecting on the day you just had?”
Hettiarachchi’s art samples are given a close inspection by one of her trusted staff members.
Gratitude holds out the cuddly cast countdownbut otherwise the app is a completely different beast. It was also designed in what Wanasinghe says was a deliberately unusual way. “Our design approach was almost bizarrely linear,” says Wanasinghe. “We deliberately didn’t outsource the app. We designed it in the same order as users would experience it.”
Other unorthodox decisions followed, including the absence of a login screen. “We wanted people to go straight into the experience and start writing,” he says. The home-screen journaling prompts are presented via cards that users flip through by tapping left and right. “It’s definitely a non-standard UX,” Wanasinghe says, “but we found over and over again that the first thing users did was flip through the cards.”
Our design approach was almost bizarrely linear. We deliberately did not expose the app. We designed it in the same order as users experience it.
Isuru Wanasinghe, Bear gratitude co-founder
Another twist: The app’s directions are written in the user’s voice, which Wanasinghe says was done to emphasize the personal nature of the app. “We wrote the app as if we were the only ones using it, which made it more relatable,” he says.
Then there are the bears, which not only serve as a distinguishing hook in a busy field, but also as a design anchor for its creators. “We always think, ‘Instead of trying to set our app apart, how do we make it ours?’ We use apps all the time, and we know how they behave. But here we tried to separate ourselves from all that, think of it as a blank canvas, and ask, ‘What do we want this experience to be?'”
Early design sketches for Bear gratitude display the collection of swipe-able prompt cards.
Bear gratitude is not a mindfulness app – Wanasinghe is careful to clarify that neither he nor Hettiarachchi are therapists or mental health professionals. “All we know are the trials and tribulations of life,” he says.
But these trials and tribulations reached a larger world. “People said, ‘This is just something I visit every day that brings me comfort,'” Wanasinghe says. “We are so grateful that this is the way we have chosen to share art. We have joined people’s lives in a meaningful way.”
Meet the 2024 Apple Design Award winners
Behind the Design is a series that explores the design practices and philosophies of the finalists and winners of the Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the scenes with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.