Introducing Interface Designer 🎉

Would Airtable consider accessibility for their on site videos? It’s very frustrating to be reading along and find that the answer I’m looking for is in a video… with no captions.

So the answer appears to be for everyone else… except those of us who need captions. I know we aren’t the majority, but we are more than you think. I continue to be surprised in this day and age how many huge companies are still not accessible. (Hint: It’s the great majority). It’s illegal, but the little guy has to take on the expense of pressuring the big guy to follow ADA law.

Please caption your videos!

Wow, this is astonishing feedback and a great reminder for the rest of us. Thank you for sharing!!

@Mary_Williams THANK YOU for sharing this and for holding Airtable accountable. This is so important and something our video teams have been actively working on, so you can expect to see improvements from Airtable on this front in the coming year - thank you again for your patience and candor, it’s very much appreciated.

This may be the wrong place to post this, my apologies if so.

I’ve been using the Interface Designer for a while now, so far it’s great and very useful getting dashboards to senior management within our company.

One issue that crops up for me is the following:

I have a Published Interface with a Bar Chart that I would like to tinker with. Either to see if I can improve it or double check my filters etc. are correct.

Currently if I make a change to that Bar Chart (let’s say I change the X Value and reset the filters) and then ultimately decide to leave it as it was, every time I go back to my Edit version of the Interface, I’m no longer seeing the Published View. Instead I’m stuck viewing the changes I had previously made and have since discarded.

As there is no current option to duplicate an Interface, it means that each time I want to tinker with that Bar Chart I would have to re-build it from scratch.

Having an option to discard all unpublished changes would be very useful at this stage of Interfaces as we’re all scrambling to see how they can be useful to us.

Happy to repost this, or submit the feedback to the appropriate channels @Jordan_Scott1

Thank you!

@Jack_P Thanks so much for passing this feedback along, I definitely see how discarding unpublished changes would be useful for many reasons! - I have submitted it to our team and they may reach out to you if they have additional questions.

@Jordan_Scott1 I would be obliged to beta test those conditional logic features within automations. Thank you!

Just a small request - Whilst working on my Work Management Interface (that helps me track meetings and work logs), I noticed that blank Record return “-” and am hoping an option can be added to allow the user to either display a blank record as “-” or, allow them to hide it completely so there’s nothing visible, essentially having an empty cell collapses so then surrounding cells take its place.

Below are two screenshots where I’m using Emoji’s to symobolise states, and when they’re no long active I’m wanting nothing, but instead a little “-” appears.

Regardless of my requests, can’t wait to hear about the latest Interface enhancements. :partying_face:

@Karlstens this is great! Thank you for the detailed screenshots, also super helpful. Just passed this along to the team

try returning one white space or line return instead of blank as your ‘else’

i dont know that it will work just a theory

Yah, the problem with that solution is that I’m then “hacking” my base entries with " " or “\n” entries, rather than leaving records as legitimate BLANK() entries.

As Interface / Base admins, we absolutely need to lay down the law with Airtable devs regarding Interface improvement and functionality, in that using a table/record work-around to fix an issue of an Beta interface - it’s not something we should tolerate as base/interface administrators. Having Interfaces in beta gives the community the opportunity to help guide the features to be built properly from the start (and hopefully avoid record entry workarounds to fix a problem with an interface).

Always good to hear suggestions though, and your suggestion was my initial line of thinking too regarding a fix for this.

I’m of the opinion of “don’t ask don’t get” so really appreciate you forwarding this on @Jordan_Scott1 - any chance we could get a rough idea of new features/fixes to test in Interfaces?

Does anyone bump into this Interface Refresh hold-up screen as many times a day as I do? It’s most annoying… I keep my interface open during the working day and constantly add notes and progress updates, but have to wait out this random page refresh more often than not…

Hello,

Would be nice if there would be option to dupliace pre-created elements. E.g. I have a graph with all the fields/filters adjusted, to make similar I need to do everything from scratch, duplicating would solve the problem.

Secondly I have strange bug in Bar charts for some reasons they are rather not a bar charts but a floating bar charts, why is that?

@Valdemar_T That’s not a bug. That’s the bar chart design as implemented in Interfaces. I think it’s supposed to be more space-conscious, and I get that, but not giving users the option for a “standard” bar chart is indeed strange.

Hello! Love the new interface! I think it’s a giant step for airtable. I’ve created a couple of layouts already, and was wondering if there was an ETA on the gallery function for the interface. It would be great to use with a record picker, versus using a filtered view in the database.

REUSABILITY !

That would be so great, isn’t it ?

olπ

Just a guess… you are grouping by multiselect or single-select field and use it’s color schema? Try to change color schema to any other.

Not allowing a public view of Interfaces is tragic for me. I don’t need people to be able to mess with them, just view them like any other view in Airtable. They’re so much cleaner and friendly than sharing a kanban or gallery view with no ability to direct folks when it comes to filters and the like…

I don’t have a couple clients I’m working with, I organize people in the hundreds, and use Airtable for a variety of things where just showing concise information is key to focusing the community.

In my case, this kills about 90% of my application for Interfaces. I’ll still use it in house with employees, but they’re the ones I pay to figure stuff out. It’s the casual folks who need the clarity when I’m trying to share information with them.

When this was first announced, I was thinking it was going to be more like the front end of an app, user friendly for me to share information with others. Back end usability and clarity when viewing data is awesome, but it’s not like I can then afford to build an app to interface with that data and use it how I need to… :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

@Justin_Barrett is there an ETA when / if Interfaces will be able to be shared publicly? This would be a killer feature for me and my team, to show dashboards & data summaries to our project stakeholders & clients. But it really isn’t feasible to add them to our workspace and spend thousands of dollars in the process just so they can see the interfaces.

That’s why we need to employ external offerings for now that are subpar to the Interface Designer, which is why we really hope that we may be able to share interfaces publicly rather sooner than later.

Password-protected Interface Designer is quintessential! Bring it on Airtable!

Welcome to the community, @Peter_Hase! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: Unfortunately I can’t help you because I’m not an Airtable employee. I and others with the “Community Leader” badge have been recognized by Airtable for our contributions to the community, but we don’t have inside knowledge about release timelines for any new/updated features.

You may have already checked them out, but tools like Stacker (disclosure: I built that!) and others can allow you to create sites and customer portals to share your Airtable data externally – including behind a secure password @Hendrick_Yap.

Any idea on when Interfaces may be shareable as view only without giving access to the entire base?

Desperately need this!

Any word on the pivot table in interface?