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.

[Databaser]

Sure. But still, it would be nice to just get some insights in their plans. Because a recent interview with Aron doesn’t indicate that they are thinking about making Interface accessible for external user in the near future, as they are aiming for bigger companies with more challenging internal processes as clients.

So please don’t blame some of us for being curious about the future in stead of always be taking by suprise. Is it something they want to do someday, somehow, or is it at the absolute bottom of their backlog? :slightly_smiling_face: Also useful to give our clients some perspective before they invest (even more) into Airtable.

But all trust in Airtable of course :blush:

[kuovonne]

Databaser:

it would be nice to just get some insights in their plans.
…
So please don’t blame some of us for being curious about the future

Absolutely! I completely agree that it is always nice to have more information from Airtable regarding their roadmap.

Any Airtable staff members who have been reading these forums for a while already knows that users (especially consultants) want to know more roadmap information. Airtable just hasn’t chosen to publicly share what they plan to do about this fact.

My post was mostly a reaction to the many posts where people were complaining about Interfaces not being public facing. I wanted to recognize that (1) Interfaces is a great feature, even without public-facing support and (2) I have a lot of hope for public-facing interfaces eventually.

I think that part of the disappointment over interfaces not being public-facing is that Airtable underestimated the desire for public-facing interfaces. People built interfaces assuming that they could be publicly shared, because people really wanted public-facing interfaces. Then they were disappointed that the interfaces could not be public-facing.

If Airtable had announced Interfaces with verbiage that made it clear up-front that interfaces were currently only for base collaborators, there would have been less disappointment. If Airtable had shown interfaces to consultants pre-general availability and discussed setting release expectations regarding what interfaces could and couldn’t do, this mismatch in expectations might have been avoided.

[Databaser]

We’re 100% on the same page here. Thanks for your reaction :muscle:

kuovonne:

is that Airtable underestimated the desire for public-facing interfaces

They really, really did :exploding_head:

[Bill_French]

kuovonne:

is that Airtable underestimated the desire for public-facing interfaces.

A finer point might be to say that Airtable has never recognized the symbiotic relationship between those who produce information and those who consume information. Even where this segmentation is known, many vendors fail to realize that it comes in three sub-flavours:

1. Few producers; many consumers.
2. Many producers; few consumers.
3. Many producers; many consumers.

Each of these flavours creates architectural and pricing complexities the likes of which are rarely considered.

Peeling this back a little further and you have formal users and casual users. A casual user might be a single worker who updates a single record once a week.

In the extreme, imagine a single no-code/low-code developer created a system that produces a unique data set that millions of people could benefit from. Another extreme is a scenario where hundreds of enterprise workers jointly produce information that is ideally suited for one person - the CEO.

Setting aside the inability of Airtable to accommodate mass demand, there is no pricing model that supports either of these success stories discretely. And while these are extreme scenarios, they are intended only to make a point -

Every market of producers has a market of consumers.

If your product addresses the needs of a specific producer but fails to consider the requirements of the producer’s consumers, traction will be fleeting.

[kuovonne]

Bill.French:

A finer point might be to say that Airtable has never recognized the symbiotic relationship between those who produce information and those who consume information.

Good points.

I see three main overlapping roles:

• System Developers
• Data Producers
• Data Consumers

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In general there tends to be fewer developers than producers/consumers. In some business models, developers have to pay more than producers/consumers. (e.g. you pay to develop the system, but the system is free for your users). In other business models developers pay less (e.g. developer for free, pay only when you publish or pay per end user).

If the goal is to democratize software creation, it makes sense to have the same bill rate for developers as producers/consumers. It lowers the bar for someone to become a developer. Thus, while some may grumble that editors have to pay the same as creators for less functionality, I don’t see this as problem because I favor lowering the bar to becoming a developer.

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When it comes to data producers, I see four really broad sub-categories:

• regular users who need consistent, full access
• limited users who need only partial and/or intermittent access
• form users who submit data, but do not read any data
• non-human data producers, such as api users

People accept that they must pay for regular users who need consistent, full access. However, people don’t like paying the same amount for limited users who need only partial or intermittent access. It is these limited users that Airtable’s pricing model does not currently address.

The intermittent access issue is sometimes addressed using “floating licenses” or “concurrent licenses”. One challenge with this method is how do you count one Airtable collaborator who is logged in and using multiple instances of Airtable at the same time.

The partial access issue has much tricker technological issues. Airtable’s original architecture was designed to make sharing information easy, and changing it to securely limit read access would probably be very complex. Preventing read access is actually much more difficult than just hiding a table in the user interface. I think Airtable decided that in order to securely “hide” selected data from users, a new interface was needed. (Think about it–all those third party portal systems that provided limited access to Airtable data all have their own user interfaces.) I think that Airtable’s “Interfaces” is a necessary step towards native support for limited read access.

The pricing model change to address these partial-access users also cannot be rolled out until after the method for providing partial access exists. I suspect that Airtable has already been investigating pricing model changes, but has not announced any because there would be no point when the underlying architecture is not ready.

The form users use-case is addressed with Airtable’s forms. These forms are not as robust as people would like, but AIrtable is not in the business of generating complex forms. Of course it would be nice if there were more options for customizing Airtable forms, but where does it end? There are many companies that do provide complex form services.

I also find it interesting that non-human data producers/consumers (REST API usage) do not incur additional fees from Airtable, but other businesses charges additional fees for API access.

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Consumers. Airtable is actually really generous when it comes to people who are only consumers of data. Read-only collaborators are free across the board. Sharing filtered views is free. API access to publish using a 3rd party service is free.

Of course, people want even more sharing (e.g. sharing dashboards), but that involves read-only security. As before, I think that interfaces is a step towards read-only security–and there is even a “dashboard” layout.

[Bill_French]

Great assessment and I like the granularity you added to tease out the developers who I typically lump into the producer category because I’m lazy.

kuovonne:

I also find it interesting that non-human data producers/consumers (REST API usage) do not incur additional fees from Airtable, but other businesses charges additional fees for API access.

This is a complex topic.

If you charge for API access, you are fundamentally placing a tax on innovation. Most vendors try to avoid disincentives that lead to lower adoption or suppress broader uses. But, even so, Airtable has created an API architecture (unlike other vendors) where a single API “user” could exhibit the load of hundreds of actual users - indeed, a gaggle of really aggressive users. This load - however light or well-designed it may be - is confined to the Airtable account; it is not a common resource with seemingly endless capacity. Unlike almost all other APIs, this API can negatively influence the performance that actual users experience.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Bill.French:

indeed, a gaggle of really aggressive users

I like the implicit metaphor here…

[Mike_Wilson1]

Is there a plan to include the ability to drop apps into the interface, such as pivot tables, or maps?

[Melissa_Bradley]

Are interfaces only accessible on Desktop?

This is perfect for my use case of sharing job info + daily scheduling with service technicians in the field, but they need to be able to access on mobile or tablet.

[Justin_Barrett]

Melissa_Bradley:

Are interfaces only accessible on Desktop?

At the moment, yes. Just as many users hope for public-facing interfaces to be added, I’m sure that adding interfaces to mobile apps is another big wish. I’m confident that it’ll happen, but the timeline is (as always) unknown.