Airtable Interface-Designer UX/UI

Hey ​@adrian0192,

Personally smoother tansitions are not at all something my clients complain about, or something that would add value to their systems! Hope such feedback helps.

On a different note, maybe custom interfaces using Omni can help with this? I should give it a shot.

I guess you are thinking about building a tool on the side for this, or similar? If that is not the case, then you might want to submit this feature request/product idea form!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

Hey there, thanks for the reply and your thought.

I did not mean it in a way, that “clients request this” but i think it could be a nice addition, as the airtable interface is very stiff in terms of customizability. You can not make it “look like your company”, it will always look like airtable. 

I would love to be able to customize a little bit more in terms of colors and shapes, not that i want to do some rocketscience with it but i came to wonder why airtable did not implement more of a “theming” approach - and i do not mean “here are some colors, buy our product to get some more colors” :-D

Not being harsh here but finding it kind of funny for how easy and open airtable is in other aspects.

Oh yes for sure, there are so many things to improve. And yet Airtable is amazing lol. Make sure to submit the feature request form shared above!!!

Hi ​@adrian0192 

Great observations—you're touching on a fundamental tension in Airtable's product positioning.

Airtable Interfaces are more inclined towards internal business tools, not consumer-facing apps. The limited customization intend to prioritize:

• Speed of development over visual polish
• Functional consistency over brand alignment
• Ease of maintenance over pixel-perfect design

For internal operations (project tracking, CRM, inventory management), these constraints are actually helpful. Teams build faster when there's less to tweak.

Current Workarounds:

• Softr/Stacker/Pory: These tools sit on top of Airtable and offer the branding/customization you're describing. They're designed specifically for client portals and external-facing apps.
• Custom builds: For truly polished experiences, many teams use Airtable as the backend (via API) and build custom frontends in tools like you mentioned (Framer, WeWeb, or even React/Next.js).

Here is My Take:

I'd love more customization options (especially theming and micro-interactions), but I understand why Airtable keeps it constrained. Their strength is rapid internal tool development, not competing with no-code app builders.

If you need customer-facing polish with Airtable data, the third-party portal builders are your best bet right now, also you can submit the feature request form to Airtable Team.

Flow Digital - Airtable Gold Services Partner — We're happy to help!

Totally agree, optional, advanced UI controls would be the best of both worlds. Keeping defaults simple is fine, but adding transitions, theming, and micro-interactions would make Airtable far more credible for customer-facing apps. Visual polish really does affect trust and conversion.

That’s exactly my point. It’s not “needed” nor is it a “dealbreaker”, but even being able to keep a brand identity within internal tools can surely win some people over.

Also i think that even only a few customisation options would help that.

• Lets say you could set a roundness-radius in three steps (round, normal, square) that affects all kinds of things (inputs, gallery cards, ...) would be enough.
• Microinteractions also don’t have to be exessive, like a “ease transition” of 0.3 seconds between states (hover, etc.) would tweak the feeling of airtable into a more rounded experience.
• If you then could set a polished dark or light mode, in combination with selecting colors from a color picker would be enough i think.

To the topic of custom builds:

Airtable works great because of the ease of use BUT three things make users going this route witch to f.e. xano or supabase after a certain time:

• api rate limits
• api speed
• lacking auth

So for me the custom-build only works for simple not data heavy tools.

If the product has those limitations, paired with a database-made-easy approach, it defies it’s purpose for users of that category. It only becomes a learning-phase before switcing to a “real” database solution, paired with their own frontend.

I think this is where my point comes from - airtable has all the tools and a great product, i think they could even cath this marketshare if they wanted to and reduce the churn rate for those cases.

I did submit the request :-)