April Interface Designer Updates

[Jordan_Scott1]

Hi all -

I hope the week is going well. I’m excited to be able to share the next wave of Interface Designer updates targeted at making interfaces even more powerful and easier to use.

• Button Element: Allows you to add a button - and configure some actions - in your interface. This will allow you to quickly approve/reject requests and gives flexibility to making status changes like assigned or complete.
  • You’ll be able to configure buttons to update a field or multiple fields of a single record with a single click. You may also choose to move to the next record.
  • You’ll be able to edit the color from 4 different options. Below are the color options and their labels. These labels are meant to be guiding principles of when to use these colors, not what they do.
    • Blue = “Primary”
    • Red = “Warning”
    • Green = “Success”
    • Gray = “Secondary”

• Calendar Element: offers the same functionality as the calendar view in an Interface. It includes the ability to customize the initial view that visitors see. This is a great way to manage your editorial/campaign calendars or to coordinate releases with product partners.

• Duplicate Element & Duplicate Interface: Duplicate an element within an interface or duplicate an entire interface. This cuts down the time spent designing your interface and makes it easy to replicate, or just utilize as a starting point.

• Right-aligned headers: Now you can put elements (like a button 👀 ) on the right-side of your header.

Additional Resources:

• Support: Duplicating an interface
• Support: Button element

If you don’t see these changes reflected right away, please try clearing your cache, and let us know your thoughts below!

[Cameron_Kaiser]

Solid update, though there is one significant flaw that jeopardizes this “fulfillment” style of workflow: The “Move to next record” feature does nothing if there is only one record remaining in the interface. If your workflow removes records from the interface upon a “Rejection” button press, it works fine until the user reaches the last record, which will then disappear from the navigation pane upon rejection, but persists on the main interface screen, functional and all. Since the record remains in front of the user, they will intuitively assume they misclicked or that the rejection did not go through; they will click again, and again. This is not only confusing to the user, but can mess up a lot of backend things if the button is pressed multiple times like this.

My use case: The interface is populated with all records that need to be reviewed. This is typically 1-5 records, since they get reviewed quickly. Thus, the issue of the persistent final record will occur very frequently. The user will experience unexpected behavior when they reject the final record and it does not disappear, unlike the previous records.

The solution: Either have the “Move to next record” function hide the current record if it’s the only one in the interface, or probably more reasonably, if the record does not exist in the navigation pane, hide it from the user. It doesn’t really make sense that records that have been removed from the interface will persist in front of the user (not to mention fully functional) anyway. The issue really hampers “fulfillment” type flows where the goal is to finish processing all the records in the interface.

[Emily_Sermons]

Hi all! I’m Emily, a Product Manager for Interface Designer. Thanks so much for all of the continued feedback on this new Interfaces launch & Interfaces as a whole!

Wanted to jump in and address the known issue with the removal of button fields from Interface Designer. This was an oversight and we’re working on a fix to get button fields working again in Interface Designer that should be live in the next few hours. Appreciate you all in the community for flagging this to our team so we can get this feature turned back on for you, and a big thanks to Jordan for bringing this to our team’s attention swiftly.

For some context on the future of buttons in Interface Designer: we are hoping to invest into the new Button element feature over time, and we believe this first launch of Record Update functionality is just the first step!

We’re hoping to update this element to encompass even more functionality in the near future, including opening URLs, navigating through your Interfaces, and triggering Automations. As we expand on the functionality of the Button element, we’re expecting to eventually deprecate the button field in Interfaces, but we want to make sure you still have access to button field functionality until we can achieve that parity.

Excited to get your continued feedback as we develop this functionality & more for Interfaces in the coming months.

[kuovonne]

@Emily_Sermons Thank you for joining this community and providing this feedback so quickly! We are looking forward to getting this fix, and appreciate knowing that all we have to do is sit tight a little longer and button fields will be back to normal. We also really appreciate the insight into the future plans for buttons in interfaces.

@Jordan_Scott1 Thanks for creating this thread at the same time as the release of these features so that we immediately had a place to put our feedback. (Technically, I think some people saw the rollout of these features/bugs a few hours before your announcement was posted, but this shorter delay is a huge improvement versus past experiences.) Thank you also for so quickly communicating the issues to the correct team and facilitating the quick reply from Emily.

[Karlstens]

All of that is super exciting. Thank you everyone involved with improving interfaces, I use my interface to manage my working day every-single-day, so it’s wonderful to hear that there’s more improvements and features coming.

Can’t wait to use a button to fire an Automation, or a script, or open a link. I was hoping too, that a button could perhaps copy either a record field or set of fields into the users Clipboard for pasting elsewhere? That would be awesome!

[Alastair_Noon]

@Emily_Sermons & @Jordan_Scott1 my list when I try to choose a record in a linked field in Interface Designer now looks like this:

when it used to look like this:

Is there a way to add this back in, because I am finding it much harder to find my lessons today unfortunately!

[Databaser]

kuovonne:

@Emily_Sermons Thank you for joining this community and providing this feedback so quickly! […] We also really appreciate the insight into the future plans for buttons in interfaces.

@Jordan_Scott1 Thanks for creating this thread at the same time as the release of these features so that we immediately had a place to put our feedback. […] Thank you also for so quickly communicating the issues to the correct team and facilitating the quick reply from Emily.

This. Entirely this. :point_up: :clap: :ok_hand:

[kuovonne]

@Alastair_Noon Thanks for sharing these two screen captures.

I can see how this would be really frustrating and impact your workflows. I hope that Airtable restores the previous behavior, at least for users who have full access to the entire base.

On the other hand, I’m taking this as a hint that Airtable is working on what interfaces might look like when we can eventually share an interface with someone who does not have access to the entire base. This limited view mimics what people see when filling out a linked record field in a form.

[Lewis_Sternberg]

Hi,

Do you guys know what could be the reason that I can not find the calendar element yet in the all elements tab?

I have tried using different interface designer templates, but this calendar element simply doesn’t show

Tahnx

[Cameron_Kaiser]

Try a hard refresh (ctrl+F5, or cmd+F5 if on mac). My new features didn’t show up until I did that.

[Tobias_LGKR]

Great new features thank you. I would like to second buttons that can trigger automations. That would help a lot.

However I really don’t understand why CREATE, DELETE and DUPLICATE records are not at the very top of your list?

Without those feature the interface is cumbersome and (depending on the application) without any real value at all, if I need to first leave the interface, go back to base, create a new record in the table and then go back to the imnterface… or am I missing something here?