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Introducing Interface Designer 🎉

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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 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:

Support Articles:

Videos:

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.

176 Comments
Allen_Moldovan
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

@Jordan_Scott1 I would be obliged to beta test those conditional logic features within automations. Thank you!

Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

Just a small request - Whilst working on my Work Management Interface (that helps me track meetings and work logs), I noticed that blank Record return “-” and am hoping an option can be added to allow the user to either display a blank record as “-” or, allow them to hide it completely so there’s nothing visible, essentially having an empty cell collapses so then surrounding cells take its place.

Below are two screenshots where I’m using Emoji’s to symobolise states, and when they’re no long active I’m wanting nothing, but instead a little “-” appears.

image

image

Regardless of my requests, can’t wait to hear about the latest Interface enhancements. :partying_face:

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

@Karlstens this is great! Thank you for the detailed screenshots, also super helpful. Just passed this along to the team :slightly_smiling_face:

Rebecca_Elam
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

try returning one white space or line return instead of blank as your ‘else’

Rebecca_Elam
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

i dont know that it will work just a theory

Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

Yah, the problem with that solution is that I’m then “hacking” my base entries with " " or “\n” entries, rather than leaving records as legitimate BLANK() entries.

As Interface / Base admins, we absolutely need to lay down the law with Airtable devs regarding Interface improvement and functionality, in that using a table/record work-around to fix an issue of an Beta interface - it’s not something we should tolerate as base/interface administrators. Having Interfaces in beta gives the community the opportunity to help guide the features to be built properly from the start (and hopefully avoid record entry workarounds to fix a problem with an interface).

Always good to hear suggestions though, and your suggestion was my initial line of thinking too regarding a fix for this.

I’m of the opinion of “don’t ask don’t get” so really appreciate you forwarding this on @Jordan_Scott1 - any chance we could get a rough idea of new features/fixes to test in Interfaces?

Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

Does anyone bump into this Interface Refresh hold-up screen as many times a day as I do? It’s most annoying… I keep my interface open during the working day and constantly add notes and progress updates, but have to wait out this random page refresh more often than not…

image

Valdemar_T
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hello,

Would be nice if there would be option to dupliace pre-created elements. E.g. I have a graph with all the fields/filters adjusted, to make similar I need to do everything from scratch, duplicating would solve the problem.

Secondly I have strange bug in Bar charts for some reasons they are rather not a bar charts but a floating bar charts, why is that?
image

Justin_Barrett
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

@Valdemar_T That’s not a bug. That’s the bar chart design as implemented in Interfaces. I think it’s supposed to be more space-conscious, and I get that, but not giving users the option for a “standard” bar chart is indeed strange.

Brandon_Parker
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Hello! Love the new interface! I think it’s a giant step for airtable. I’ve created a couple of layouts already, and was wondering if there was an ETA on the gallery function for the interface. It would be great to use with a record picker, versus using a filtered view in the database.