Introducing Interface Designer 🎉

Also chiming in to say that I really appreciate this – I have been very much in need of this exact thing. EXCEPT, the lack of ability to share that with people who are not on AT pretty much ruins it for me.

Here is how I am using this:

I run a company that has many consultants who run trainings for us, and we have base that is a list of everyone’s assignments, that we share in calendar view. Each event has a very long record attached to it because it holds all of the info needed to run that training. At the moment, the trainer goes to the calendar, clicks on that event, and then has to scroll through the record and read all the info. It’s not ideal because with syncing multiple bases, getting things in the right order is hard, its a lot of extra steps for our consultants and it is not particularly easy to read from the calendar view.

So, I used the interface to create a “trainer assignment sheet” that has all of the information that trainer needs. It looks great, easy to read, perfect. Except, I have no way to share each of those individual with the consultants who are doing that training. I am not going to pay $240 a year for each of consultants to access AT, when they really only need to see 2-4 records a year. So that leaves me with a gorgeous, self-populating interface that the people for whom it is for, cannot access.

My requests so far:

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  Make it so that each record on a view has it’s own interface that can be shared by link (same way that we can share a certain view of records),

  
  


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  Make it so that the interface can be shared by embedding into a website (same way that we can embed from a view now),

  
  

Thank you!!!

Thank you ScottWorld, so if I understand right, if I want to create a form without giving access to my base, I have to do it in the old way (and using thirdy party methods for the EDIT forms).

Dario

Yes, that is correct.

Mutatis mutandis for many of my clients, being a ventilation company that works on different projects for different building promotors, a engineering company that does studies on different building phases for different architects and contractors, a marketing company that wants to offer a view to their clients of all the actions they are taking for multiple marketing actions at once, …

But, being a Business Unit Manager at a training/consultancy company myself, your user case is recognizable :cowboy_hat_face:

Not quite. While you can build form-like structures with it, and with a little work (as @kuovonne has demonstrated) you could even use this feature to add new records, it’s not a form, and was not created to replace/enhance Airtable’s form features. Its primary purpose—based on this initial feature set, anyway—is to provide greater flexibility for base collaborators when viewing and editing existing data.

Hi there!

Is there any way to delete a record from an interface?

Thank you

Hi @Jordan_Scott1,

While it’s cool for newbies to discover interfaces by always placing Interfaces at the very top of their Airtable Home Page (i.e. above all workspaces), I would actually much prefer to have the Interfaces section draggable & moveable on the home page, just like we can move workspaces wherever we want.

I work with tons of different client bases, so as my clients have started publishing all these new interfaces for themselves, all of their published interfaces are now cluttering up my home page by pushing down all of my most important workspaces & bases much lower on my home page.

This is not desired behavior, because it makes the experience of working with Airtable much less user-friendly.

My most important workspaces & frequently-accessed bases used to be at the very top of my home page, but now all of my workspaces & bases have been pushed down much further on the page, off the page completely, beneath all of my clients’ published interfaces!

This requires me to constantly need to scroll to get to the very things that I use the most frequently. Sure, I can click on my workspaces in the left margin to help me scroll down to my workspaces, but this is still an extra step, and it still places my workspaces off-screen. These things used to be right at the top of my screen.

This is not desirable behavior for me, because I don’t have a reason for everyone’s interfaces to be at the top of my screen at all times… I need my most important workspaces & bases to be at the top of my screen at all times.

However, all of this also calls into question the organization of Interfaces in general… it doesn’t necessarily seem like it makes a lot of sense for all the Interfaces from all the bases to be grouped together in a separate “Interfaces” section… it seems like they should be grouped with the base/workspace from which they are interacting with.

p.s. I should add that my bases are viewed as a grid, not a list. If I change it to a list, things are slightly better because I only have to scroll down one page instead of multiple pages, but really no scrolling should be necessary as all. This entire Interfaces placement needs to be completely rethought by Airtable.

Agreed. It seems like icons for Bases could have an “expand” feature that reveals all of the associated Interfaces.

This is really the perfect idea!

I think there’s a deeper issue lurking inside your comment. It suggests you are storing different client’s financial data in multi-tenancy - i.e., all clients in the same base if not in the same tables. The risk, of course, is data leakage between clients and that – in the accountancy profession – is a big red flag.

The possibility for data leakage impacts all sorts of things from local and federal compliance issues to legal and liability issues. Most insurers will refuse to pay any liability claims if the architecture is multi-tenancy without segregated schema’s and discrete security contexts. This is usually stated in the fine print of the policies.

Fundamental to this architecture …

1. Each client has a registered schema


2. Infrastructure code sets the active schema


3. Any application instance has a connection pool per schema

As to #1, this is tantamount to a separate base at the very least, and even this might not be enough segregation.

#2 and #3 are almost impossible to achieve with Airtable unless you create a custom front end or maybe use Stacker to abstract the clients from the data at rest.

I have to agree with @Bill.French. I hope none of your clients are on this forum…

Pretty well cancels out any potential for HIPAA certification.

This feature is just what I’ve been waiting for - thank you Airtable Team!

One request: Please make it possible easily move around the columns in a grid view inside an interface like you can in a normal grid view. Currently, you have to add fields to the visible list in the right order, which is a little annoying. For example, I may want to move a field from the 5th column in the Grid View to the second column.

Keep up the good work!

WHAAAAAT :exploding_head: :star_struck: I’m DM-ing for beta!

Aren’t we all already using the beta?

If you provide a Grid in your interface, user can select one or more records and then right-click near the field-selection box and pick “Delete Selected Records” from the contextual menu.

You can I think do it with an automation as well. (I saw a video made by @Kuovonne where she appeared to be doing this.)

Yah, the Automations method is OK to use as a workaround, but it’s not exactly elegant for everyday user case (and I have a couple of local date-time hold-ups with Automations too). I’ve since posted to Airtable Support and judging by the positive reply I believe we should be seeing some of the requests developed soon.

Note that this only works for a grid that is directly connected to a table. It currently does not work on a grid view of a linked record field.

Yes, I did it with an automation script. In many cases I prefer having a script for deletion instead of the native delete because a script can include additional logic, such as doing a cascade delete to avoid orphaned records in a linked table, or warning before deleting a record that has linked records.

For the ID, yes. For branched automations, apparently no.

Hi Jordan! I can’t see an option to DM you, can you share an email address instead?

Click on her icon then select “message”.

I wanted to love this (I realize it’s a beta release), and it’s almost what I’m looking for but…

• It seems like in order to use it with others who need even a tiny bit of editing access, you’d have to be on a free plan. Otherwise I’m expected to pay $240/year for someone to interact with a handful of records. Not feasible when working with multiple collaborators. So I can’t have the power and features of Pro and also give people minimal editing access to Airtable records.


• Given that someone has to be a collaborator, they can then access the entire base and all of its tables/views. And since they need editing rights in order to edit in interfaces, they can then do the same in the base itself. Far from ideal.


• As far as I can tell (maybe I’m wrong), collaborators can access all interfaces added to a base, as opposed to just the ones I’d want them to see. So, making myself a personal interface as an admin isn’t possible, since anyone else with access will see all the interfaces. Is this really the case?

It’s a great start but given that tools like Softr allow unlimited applications and up to 10,000 members (with granular access/permissions) for $79/month this doesn’t quite cut it when trying to securely give people a clean view of data (and ONLY that view) with the ability to edit/add a bit of that data.

In a perfect world:

• Let the admin/owner be on a paid plan and not have to also pay for interface collaborators (or at least not full price)


• Access can be granted to just interfaces, and also not to every interface in a base (this can require an Airtable login if need be)


• Collaborators can edit existing records (maybe even place reasonable limits to avoid abuse and people working around upgrading accounts)…maybe they can be assigned to X number of records, and only modify those records.


• (Separate from just interfaces) Don’t make every role cost the same on paid bases, such that a commenter costs the same as someone with total access. Maybe this means that someone on a paid plan would be willing to pay $2 each for 10 commenters. Or $5 each for 20 edit-only-assigned-records collaborators.

I love Airtable and find any excuse to use it, but it’s difficult trying to work with others who need just a small glimpse into data that is relevant to them, and being able to make slight modifications, occasionally. Hopefully the interface designer can be a step in that direction

I am getting an error “Sorry, you cannot send a personal message to that user.”

I fully agree with this. As Airtable is aiming for big companies (as I understand from different interviews lately), I don’t understand how they will benefit on longer term from the combo of Interface Designer as a feature vs asking $ 240 per team member who wants an interface and some interaction. Not to mention all the companies who just want to share some data with their external clients and let them make some edits.

Hey @ScottWorld - Thank you for your thoughts here! We’ve been having conversations internally about the best ways to structure our homepage as a whole. As teams create new interfaces and the amount of workflows they add to Airtable grows, the homepage can get busy, quickly. While we don’t have exact news on what our changes will look like or when you’ll see homepage updates, know that we are thinking about it. We’ll share this feedback with the team as they continue to scope work.

The fact that Airtable users want external people to have limited edit access to their bases (and no additional access) without paying $240/year per external editor is clear.

I may be making a lot of assumptions here, but Airtable had to decide on a method of building that external user interface first before it could grant limited access to anyone. And the ability to have a custom user interface is beneficial to users who are collaborators already. So it makes sense for Airtable to create that user interface builder and make it available to existing users as soon as the interface builder is ready, even if the other work for sharing the interface outside the organization isn’t ready yet.

Interfaces is still in beta and is barely a week old. It has a a few quirks and doesn’t yet have many of the features we want. However, I’m glad that Airtable decided to make Interfaces available now, rather than waiting until those additional features are built out.

Airtable has shown that they can periodically release incremental feature enhancements. I’m looking forward to seeing those future feature releases.