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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
Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

@Jyo_D Iโ€™m so thrilled to hear that youโ€™re loving Interface Designer! Right now, you are not able to embed interfaces, but this is an awesome suggestion that Iโ€™ll make sure to pass along to our product team :slightly_smiling_face:

augmented
10 - Mercury
10 - Mercury

How about an html element in ID itself? :slightly_smiling_face:

Jack_P
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Synced Tables can achieve this for now FYI

Tristan-ARG
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hi,

Really simple advice, when I try to change the columns width of a grill, its really difficult to change the ones that are on the right edge, because every time I press there the โ€œproperties boxโ€ pops up and cover the column, so I cannot change

The way around that I found, is move the column to the left, change the columns width, and then move back the column to the desired location.

I am loving the interface designer, it really has helped me to get the information how I want, when I need it.

Cheers

Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

Good morning @Jordan_Scott1

Just checking to see if thereโ€™s any news on Interface Designer new features and enhancements, as thereโ€™s been a lot of community feedback, and it would be great to hear about Airtableโ€™s progress and consideration of these features.

Edit: Feature Request - As previously mentioned buttons, but with the ability to โ€œcopy to clipboardโ€ so that when the user clicks a button then text from a record field lands in their clipboard for future pasting.

Mary_Williams
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Would Airtable consider accessibility for their on site videos? Itโ€™s very frustrating to be reading along and find that the answer Iโ€™m looking for is in a videoโ€ฆ with no captions.
So the answer appears to be for everyone elseโ€ฆ except those of us who need captions. I know we arenโ€™t the majority, but we are more than you think. I continue to be surprised in this day and age how many huge companies are still not accessible. (Hint: Itโ€™s the great majority). Itโ€™s illegal, but the little guy has to take on the expense of pressuring the big guy to follow ADA law.
Please caption your videos!

Paul_Warren1
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Wow, this is astonishing feedback and a great reminder for the rest of us. Thank you for sharing!!

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

@Mary_Williams THANK YOU for sharing this and for holding Airtable accountable. This is so important and something our video teams have been actively working on, so you can expect to see improvements from Airtable on this front in the coming year - thank you again for your patience and candor, itโ€™s very much appreciated.

Jack_P
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

This may be the wrong place to post this, my apologies if so.

Iโ€™ve been using the Interface Designer for a while now, so far itโ€™s great and very useful getting dashboards to senior management within our company.

One issue that crops up for me is the following:

I have a Published Interface with a Bar Chart that I would like to tinker with. Either to see if I can improve it or double check my filters etc. are correct.

Currently if I make a change to that Bar Chart (letโ€™s say I change the X Value and reset the filters) and then ultimately decide to leave it as it was, every time I go back to my Edit version of the Interface, Iโ€™m no longer seeing the Published View. Instead Iโ€™m stuck viewing the changes I had previously made and have since discarded.
As there is no current option to duplicate an Interface, it means that each time I want to tinker with that Bar Chart I would have to re-build it from scratch.

Having an option to discard all unpublished changes would be very useful at this stage of Interfaces as weโ€™re all scrambling to see how they can be useful to us.

Happy to repost this, or submit the feedback to the appropriate channels @Jordan_Scott1

Thank you!

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

@Jack_P Thanks so much for passing this feedback along, I definitely see how discarding unpublished changes would be useful for many reasons! - I have submitted it to our team and they may reach out to you if they have additional questions. :slightly_smiling_face: