Welcome to Change Makers, our series highlighting customer stories and builders making an incredible impact with Airtable. Today’s Change Maker was the community-led hackathon Airtable AI winner who built an educational RPG game designed to rid any initial fear of learning a new tool all on Airtable!
About the Builder
Lisa Bauer (
What's a fun fact most people (or your coworkers) don't know about you?
Back when I was in the classical music world, I performed with Sister Hazel (an American rock band) and with actor Jeffrey Wright who was narrating Peter and the Wolf.
What's the first thing you ever built with Airtable?
At IDEO, I redesigned the process of identifying and staffing designers onto projects by changing what used to require logging into 3 different systems into one centralized Airtable workflow 🙌🏻 This was originally built for just the Teambuilders (that's what we were called 😁) but it ultimately scaled across the NA business unit after the Interface Designer launched in 2022 and I was able to build additional UI on top of the same database, increasing visibility and accessibility for designers and leaders.
What advice would you give to someone just getting started with Airtable?
"Build to Learn." That was one of the core values at IDEO that I continue to practice every day. With Airtable, start with something low-stakes like a birthday party planner or a weekly meal plan. Now with Omni, you can do this so much faster and dive into understanding how Tables, Records, and Fields organize your data without getting paralyzed with questions like "Should this live in a separate table? Which field type do I pick? How do I link these?" Let Omni handle those. Once those answers start feeling obvious, then try building one from scratch! And don't stop. 😉 The more you build, the more you'll start to see how data is connected and how Airtable helps capture those connections in a meaningful way.
The Challenge & Airtable Solution
When a new tool like Airtable is rolled out to a team or company, there's always resistance. Users forced to sit through hours of training often seem skeptical, distracted, or defensive. When the go-live date arrives, they complain, delay adoption, or go rogue, but Lisa believes this isn't a people problem. Instead, she sees it as a situation problem, or as she calls it, a “design opportunity.” She wanted to reimagine what the onboarding experience could be for new users learning Airtable.
Inspired by the March Airtable-Led Community Hackathon's theme "Let's Play," Lisa explored how new users could learn about Airtable by playing a game. With the custom interface recently launched at the time, she was excited to explore its possibilities. She didn't know what it could or couldn't do, but she knew what she wanted users to feel: curious, safe, and joyful.
The result was Friends with Airtable, an educational RPG game designed to rid any initial fear of learning a new tool by introducing new users to basic Airtable features alongside beloved characters from Friends. The game allows users to explore three locations in the RPG universe, complete challenges associated with each location, and interact with Friends characters who host those challenges!
Lisa's approach involved a lot of trial and error, but the most successful version had her using Claude as her design partner and Omni as her builder. She built out the Airtable database with the necessary tables, fields, and records, then asked Omni to build an RPG interface based on the database. She then used Claude to help make tweaks to the interface source code (since she doesn't have a coding background) to improve the experience. Leaning on the respective strengths of Omni and Claude helped her build the game much faster than when she tried to only use Omni for everything.
📺 Want to see it in action? Check out Lisa’s hackathon entry here:
The Results
Lisa successfully created a working prototype that demonstrates how Airtable onboarding can be transformed from a traditional training session into an engaging, playful experience. By using Airtable AI to accelerate the build process, she had more time to focus on the UI/UX and ensuring new users would feel curious, safe, and joyful as they learned.
Lisa’s creative game proves that enablement can be treated as experience design, and it opens up new possibilities for how teams adopt and embrace new tools!
What's Next
Friends with Airtable was Lisa dipping her toes.
Since then, she's been swimming deeper and deeper into the ocean of enablement and change management, and exploring how she might design an "Airtable 101" program. She's excited to continue sharing her progress via her LinkedIn profile as she designs an onboarding program where her colleagues can experience the power of Airtable. Once she has more working prototypes based on real data, she's looking forward to using the frontend Omni to learn how it might help synthesize and analyze data to turn it into actionable insights!
Copy & Paste AI Prompt
Lisa played around with a few prompts within Omni, but here is an example of a longer one she ran with:
Build a top-down pixel art RPG in the style of a Pokémon Game Boy Color game called "Friends with Airtable" as a single Interface page based on the existing database. Do not create new tables or data — reference only the tables and fields already built in this base. The game teaches new Airtable users core product features through a series of missions and challenges set in the world of the TV show Friends.
The player navigates a top-down pixel art map with three accessible locations pulled from the Locations table. The player moves their avatar using arrow keys or on-screen directional controls.
When the player walks up to an NPC and presses the interact button, a dialogue pop-up appears in pixel art RPG style. The NPC explains their situation in character-appropriate dialogue.
Each mission launches as a pop-up overlay on top of the game world. The overlay has a mission title card, then guides the player through 3 sequential challenges. Each challenge appears one at a time. The challenge UI should simulate the relevant Airtable feature clearly and interactively within the pop-up. The Airtable feature should NOT be in RPG within these challenges. We want the players to become familiar with the look and feel of Airtable.
Did this use case inspire you? Drop a comment below if you're similarly using Airtable to leverage customer feedback into proactive data, and share how you're using Airtable to change the way you work for a chance to be our next Change Maker spotlight!