Introducing Interface Designer 🎉

[Jordan_Scott1]

We are excited to announce that as of today, the Interface Designer beta is open to everyone, which means you will now be able to create interfaces right from your bases, no code required.

What is Interface Designer exactly? Interface Designer lets you build visual and interactive interfaces using your base’s underlying data. By creating custom interfaces for your stakeholders, you can isolate the information that’s critical to them and none of the other details. This makes it tremendously easy to understand the status of a project and what’s required from whom. Jump right in or keep reading for a comprehensive round-up of everything you’ll need to get started, plus information about a few other features you’ll start seeing after today :tada:

Before we go into more details, make sure to mark your calendars for the next Airtable Community AMA on December 1, with Product Manager JB Bakst, where we’ll dive into all things Interface Designer.

Common Questions

What are some of the common use cases for interfaces?

Interfaces can be used for just about anything, but some of the popular use cases we’ve seen so far include dashboards to view aggregated information & metrics, summaries to view key information about a project, record summaries for research insights, and record triage for things like customer feedback or campaign asset reviews - we can’t wait to see what you come up with next!

What permissions are required to create an interface?

Creator and owner permissions on the base you’d like to build an interface for.

If I share an Interface with another individual or team, can they see the underlying data?

For now, interface access requires you to have base access. So yes, anyone you share an interface with will have access to the underlying data.

When should I use Interface Designer vs. Page Designer (or another feature?)

Some key distinctions that Interface Designer offers:

• Dynamic & interactive
• Can share data from multiple tables within a base side by side
• Easy to onboard collaborators without needed to teach them how to use the Base or fear that they may edit the wrong thing
• Filter records based on the collaborator viewing the interface

Page Designer is ideal for instances where you need to provide a non-editable view of static information during a specific moment in time. One example is if you need to deliver a presentation or want to create a PDF.

Resources to help you get the most out of Interface Designer:

Guides:

• Your guide to designing an interface
• Simplify collaboration with the record review interface
• Highlight key details with the record summary interface
• When to use Interface Designer and other Airtable collaboration features
• Report on metrics with the dashboard interface

Support Articles:

• Creating interfaces in Interface Designer
• Managing and navigating interfaces
• Choosing a layout for your interface
• Adding and formatting elements in interfaces
• Configuring elements in interfaces
• Editing, previewing, publishing, and sharing interfaces

Videos:

• How to create an interface
• Explore Interface Designer layouts
• Empower your team with Interface Designer
• Tool Tips: Youtube series video on Interface designer
• Table Talk: Youtube Livestream on Interface Designer

Want more great news? We didn’t stop there, take a look at all the other fun features you can expect to see starting today as well.

Enhanced features for admins:

You’ll notice a slick redesign of the Admin Panel, created to be more user-friendly. Next, we’ve added significant new security controls—like Audit Log APIs and workspace share restrictions. And finally, we’ve improved base performance across the board, making your largest bases more responsive than ever before.

Additional power for your workflows:

And finally, we’re proud to share new integrations to help you bring more data into Airtable, and improvements to automations.

We’ve updated our automations interface to make it even more intuitive, with easy-to-read modals. Now it’s easier to set up a new automation with a fancy full-screen mode, and a handy guide that will walk you through every step of the process. We’re also starting to beta test conditional logic, which allows users to trigger automations only when certain conditions are met.

And last but not least, we’re adding new integrations for external source syncs from our partners at Zendesk, Github issues, and Google Drive—available to all customers on Enterprise plans.

[Justin_Barrett]

I played a bit with this last night before I went to bed, and it was the first thing on my mind when I woke up. So excited about the possibilities!

[kuovonne]

Justin_Barrett:

So excited about the possibilities!

Same here. I played with it a bit last night. And then I woke up wanting to build out the two use cases that I have demoed. Even with this initial set of features, there is a lot of power to make workflows easier. I am even more excited to see what improvements are rolled out over the course of the upcoming year.

[Juste_Fanou]

It would be good to have the ability to add new records in the ‘records list’. Perhaps based on some kind of permissioning system.

[ScottWorld]

Two great videos today, @kuovonne! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: :raised_hands:

I hope that Airtable can fix that issue of the linked records from 2 child tables away not clearing out when you switch to a different parent record. It looks like it will update linked records from 1 child table away, but not 2 tables away.

@Jordan_Scott1 This would probably be a good issue to share with the developers.

[Jordan_Scott1]

@Nathalie_Collins At this time, you can only share with your existing collaborators. There is a more detailed support article if you’d like to take a look as well. Hope this is helpful!

[Julian_Wan]

Incredible to see this sort of non-stop productive updates from a company during covid. Thank you guys for adding this!

I’ve jumped in so far… really impressed so far, I only wish there was the ability to add new records from record list views within the interface!

[Jason_Curtis_Dr]

There seems to be a bug with the Timeline feature when it is connected to a record list. At least in one of my bases.

When I create a Timeline Element and set the Source as the ‘Record list’, only a small number of Fields are available. It seems to be the Fields that are linked to other tables in the bases. Then, when trying to set the ‘Date setting’, nothing is available to select, even though the tab has multiple date fields.

Maybe I’m just not understanding how this works?

[Olpy_Acaflo]

Hello @Jordan_Scott1

I am AIRTABLE Pro paid Plan and the only Editor of my Bases.

Here’s my Original Table & Content : text & pictures as usual in my AIRTABLE most frequent use cases…

I made my tests by sharing my first interfaces attempts in readOnly mode with my spam email address as one says on certain social networks Apps :slightly_smiling_face:

This user (it is me too) previously unknown of AIRTABLE opened my email, clicked on my link of interface sharing and obtained it in his workspace

after having made a SignUp towards a new AIRTABLE Free Tier, which is in fact a trial of 14 days of a Pro Tier.

All this works very well : very better show UX than ever got from some third-part Grids, Galleries interfaces I tried before learning html/CSS/js by the hard way (Work In Progress).

except that this User can see all my Base, all that it contains, because of 2 links to reach this Base present in the new AIRTABLE Interface UI

and

I would like these links and SHARE button never exist in that shared Interface real estate (subsequent to REACT Components reUsability ?) but it is out-of-scope of this message.

Does the visibility of my Interface generated from my Pro Plan Account but shared with an email address that just opened an Airtable Free-Tier account to enjoy it in Read-Only mode get an unlimited LifeTime or will it disappear after 14 days, at the end of the 14 days Trial of the new Free Tier involved in this test?

How long will I be able to share some new Interfaces with that AIRTABLE Free Tier as I’m publishing from my Pro Plan AIRTABLE account ?

I totally agree to spent more money involving my present Pro Tier to AIRTABLE in a future end of BETA time, but I would continue to share free ReadOnly interfaces to Free-Tiers as I’m already doing that with my shared & embedded VIEWs, from a long time, and outside of any AIRTABLE workspace, Free or Paid Plan : WEB Browser is enough to take a look at any of my shared readOnly VIEWS.
But new AIRTABLE Interface Designer is such better than any existing GRID, GAL, KANBAN existing VIEW that I definitely prefer continue building new Airtable Interfaces !

Regards,

olπ

[Kamille_Parks]

Seems like Interfaces follows all Base permissions so: If you have a read-only user, they are read only until you remove them. All Airtable “accounts” are free, you are charged by the workspaces you own. Users you add to your base/interface don’t disappear from the base/interface when their trial ends because they’re trial is irrelevant to the base for which you made the interface.

[Peter_Sekula]

It’s a huge huge tease to have this transformative functionality but no support for button fields! Arrggghh! Our buttons call scripts that call other APIs. Hope this comes soon.