Understanding how designers think and make decisions.

I wanted to introduce myself but I realized its all detailed in my profile above. Myself and a colleague at www.charlesmudy.com have been working on this project www.explanatic.com for about 3 months now (design and code 1 month and soft launch 2 months ago), the idea came from my personal experience when I dived into design.

Background story:

Coming from coding to design wasn’t just a random decision but a personal one, you see… I have always thought I was a programmer (don’t confuse this with HTML5 or CSS3) but I was totally wrong. Wrong in the sense of “I want to be a programmer” and not “I enjoy being a programmer” and this obviously reflected in my performance. After a while and brutal failures in most of my work, I realize its time to do something I actual enjoy and I’ve always wanted to do — which is design. Not that am running away from failures but focusing on something I’ve always being passionate about and hopefully will be good at was simply the best way to go and by doing so means splitting responsibilities, giving to caesar what belongs to caesar (got a real programmer on board).

If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Marc Anthony

The Problem:

Since I have decided to call myself a Product Designer which I believe is what I do, the journey hasn’t been smooth at all. From becoming a professional Dribbbler to Behancee didn’t work quite well for me, not that I don’t get the inspirations (because I still visit those sites to see whats new) but not understanding the contexts behind those designs was my problem (perhaps other people have similar problem too).

The Solution:

I’ve been fortunate to work on amazing projects and with clients who understands the value of good design and how it can impact a product, during my early days of transition, I was writing down my thoughts when creating a simple pen and paper sketch — to connect my design solution to the given problem. When I share the sketches, my notes are there. One of the client was super-amazed with such approach, we were able to iterate and finalize on what was needed quickly.

I continued on this process for couple of months and while I still struggled to get the detailed contexts of those inspirational designs, I eventually stumbled across this post (The dribbblisation of design) — I suggest you read it, it was totally clear this problem exist and you can see from the comments. Actually, this also made me realize I was looking at those platforms from the wrong side. Inspiration is different from explanation, meaning to say, those platforms are not meant to give me explanations since that wasn’t their fundamental purpose but to show me what is new and trendy.

I spoke to couple of friends on my design process, gathered some feedbacks from clients and based on my findings from research, I decided to do something about it and Explanatic was born … yeaaahhh.

Explanatic.com will be a platform to share and learn how designers think when they design, understanding the context behind every design decisions. During the first month of launching, one core feature that was integrated is the ability to make a design private and only accessible to those who have the access key. The reason behind this is simply to allow sharing of work with client only (or team) rather than making it public and that has really been valuable for us at Charlesmudy.

Next step:

We did a soft public launch about 2 months ago, here are some of the feedbacks we got:

feedback

feedback

feedback

Its getting clear, designers can connect to Explanatic and the values it can provide to a larger community. A design agency wrote:

Now, this is really a good news and I’m totally astonished that people can relate to the idea. Perhaps when you solve a problem you have, its easier to replicate. Like every projects, you start small and hopefully grow. It is still early to say what can be added as a feature but the core idea would remain the same — share designs with context.

While thinking (and researching) some of the areas Explanatic can create more value, I stumbled across this article Let’s talk about design portfolios and I noted this:

The fundamental flaw that disqualifies most design portfolios we receive is the fact they don’t present the problem that was solved and the decisions taken to reach the solution.

Looking at Explanatic from this angle, wouldn’t it be useful if a newbie shares his/her profile from Explanatic? I believe this can also help companies recruit better designers, I mean designers who clearly understands what they’re designing.

Sharing design context/process does not only benefit the designer but also makes it easy for junior designers to understand the thinking behind those designs, so they’re not only getting inspired but learning in the process.

I hope it becomes a great platform for designers to share, learn, get inspired and have fun while doing so. The future is certainly bright!

www.explanatic.com Facebook and Twitter

Thanks for reading.