Friday, August 7
Friday, August 7
Friday, August 7
In my last work log, I was pretty obsessed with one question: "How far can AI actually take us?" It was all about moving Figma tokens into code, building React components, automating content entry, and wiring everything up through deployment. This time around, though, the core question shifted a bit.
"What does Xplored actually need to become a real product—one that people genuinely use, keep coming back to, and use to share their own work?"
At first, Xplored was closer to a resource bookmark site for designers. It was structured to aggregate good tools, references, and insights, and explain why they were worth checking out. But as I kept building, I felt like something vital was missing.
Simply showing resources wasn't enough.
It needed to go one step further: "So, what did people actually create with those resources?"
So this time, I decided to build Works—a dedicated space inside Xplored where users can share their actual outcomes.
The first thing I tackled was the "work upload" feature.
Initially, I thought keep it simple: wouldn't a title, an image, and a description be enough? But when I actually tried uploading something myself, it felt way too bare. A designer’s work rarely ever ends with just a single image.
So I redesigned Works to pack in more context:
Instead of a plain portfolio thumbnail card, it’s shaping up to be more like a mini case study. It’s not just "I made this image," but a way to log what was used, with what intent, and what results came out of it.
The second thing—and what ate up most of my time—was the upload editor.
At first, it was just a plain input box for descriptions. But when I actually tried writing a work log, I realized I needed paragraphs, lists, links, and images to flow together naturally for the writing experience to feel right. So I added a lightweight, Notion-style editor.
Now, you can type / to bring up block options, mix in some Markdown, and drop images right into the middle of the body. While building it, I kept tweaking the tiny details:
These might sound like tiny nitpicks on a feature list, but the second you actually sit down to write, you feel the difference instantly. I realized once again that in an editor, the gap between "it works" and "I actually want to keep using this" is huge.
The absolute highlight of this update was connecting the resources used to the actual outcomes.
At its core, Xplored is all about "resources designers can actually use in practice." But if those resources aren't tied to real creations, they just sit there as a soul-less list of tools.
So I added a Made with section at the bottom of the Work detail page. For example, if a project used Figma, Midjourney, Framer, and Claude Code, those exact tools pop up right beneath the work.
At first, it just rendered whatever plain text the user typed in, but now it automatically links up whenever the name matches a resource registered on Xplored. It attaches nice little icons, and clicking one takes you straight to that resource’s detail page. Flip it around, and on the resource page, you can now see "Works created with this tool."
This is a massive shift for Xplored. Resources are no longer floating in isolation—they now carry the rich, living context of real-world usage.
Building Works didn't mean neglecting the existing features. I've been continuously polishing the resources and insights sections as well lately, I’ve been redesigning resource detail pages so that related articles, similar tools, and Works that used them all show up together. Where it used to stop at "hey, this tool is cool," I now want to create a natural, loop-like flow:
Discover a tool > Read related insights > See what others built with it > Try it in your own work > Share your outcome back to Works!
I wanted Xplored to be more than just a collection of bookmarks—I wanted a virtuous cycle that flows from discovery > understanding > creation > sharing.
To make it feel like a polished, real service, the behind-the-scenes foundational work was essential too.
