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Introducing Interface Designer ๐ŸŽ‰

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Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

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 baseโ€™s underlying data. By creating custom interfaces for your stakeholders, you can isolate the information thatโ€™s critical to them and none of the other details. This makes it tremendously easy to understand the status of a project and whatโ€™s required from whom. Jump right in or keep reading for a comprehensive round-up of everything youโ€™ll need to get started, plus information about a few other features youโ€™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 weโ€™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 weโ€™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 canโ€™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 youโ€™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:

Support Articles:

Videos:

Want more great news? We didnโ€™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:

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

Additional power for your workflows:

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

Weโ€™ve updated our automations interface to make it even more intuitive, with easy-to-read modals. Now itโ€™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. Weโ€™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, weโ€™re adding new integrations for external source syncs from our partners at Zendesk, Github issues, and Google Driveโ€”available to all customers on Enterprise plans.

176 Comments
Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

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

kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

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.

Databaser
12 - Earth
12 - Earth

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

Zac
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hi Jordan! I canโ€™t see an option to DM you, can you share an email address instead?

Kamille_Parks
16 - Uranus
16 - Uranus

Click on her icon then select โ€œmessageโ€.

Nick_Simard
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I wanted to love this (I realize itโ€™s a beta release), and itโ€™s almost what Iโ€™m looking for butโ€ฆ

  • It seems like in order to use it with others who need even a tiny bit of editing access, youโ€™d have to be on a free plan. Otherwise Iโ€™m expected to pay $240/year for someone to interact with a handful of records. Not feasible when working with multiple collaborators. So I canโ€™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 Iโ€™m wrong), collaborators can access all interfaces added to a base, as opposed to just the ones Iโ€™d want them to see. So, making myself a personal interface as an admin isnโ€™t possible, since anyone else with access will see all the interfaces. Is this really the case?

Itโ€™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 doesnโ€™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)โ€ฆmaybe they can be assigned to X number of records, and only modify those records.
  • (Separate from just interfaces) Donโ€™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 itโ€™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 :slightly_smiling_face:

Zac
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

I am getting an error โ€œSorry, you cannot send a personal message to that user.โ€

Databaser
12 - Earth
12 - Earth

I fully agree with this. As Airtable is aiming for big companies (as I understand from different interviews lately), I donโ€™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.

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

Hey @ScottWorld - Thank you for your thoughts here! Weโ€™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 donโ€™t have exact news on what our changes will look like or when youโ€™ll see homepage updates, know that we are thinking about it. Weโ€™ll share this feedback with the team as they continue to scope work.

kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

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 isnโ€™t ready yet.

Interfaces is still in beta and is barely a week old. It has a a few quirks and doesnโ€™t yet have many of the features we want. However, Iโ€™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. Iโ€™m looking forward to seeing those future feature releases.