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.

[Olpy_Acaflo]

Valdemar_T:

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.

REUSABILITY !

That would be so great, isn’t it ?

olπ

[Alexey_Gusev]

Just a guess… you are grouping by multiselect or single-select field and use it’s color schema? Try to change color schema to any other.

[Sherman_Sanders]

Not allowing a public view of Interfaces is tragic for me. I don’t need people to be able to mess with them, just view them like any other view in Airtable. They’re so much cleaner and friendly than sharing a kanban or gallery view with no ability to direct folks when it comes to filters and the like…

I don’t have a couple clients I’m working with, I organize people in the hundreds, and use Airtable for a variety of things where just showing concise information is key to focusing the community.

In my case, this kills about 90% of my application for Interfaces. I’ll still use it in house with employees, but they’re the ones I pay to figure stuff out. It’s the casual folks who need the clarity when I’m trying to share information with them.

When this was first announced, I was thinking it was going to be more like the front end of an app, user friendly for me to share information with others. Back end usability and clarity when viewing data is awesome, but it’s not like I can then afford to build an app to interface with that data and use it how I need to… :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

[Peter_Hase]

@Justin_Barrett is there an ETA when / if Interfaces will be able to be shared publicly? This would be a killer feature for me and my team, to show dashboards & data summaries to our project stakeholders & clients. But it really isn’t feasible to add them to our workspace and spend thousands of dollars in the process just so they can see the interfaces.

That’s why we need to employ external offerings for now that are subpar to the Interface Designer, which is why we really hope that we may be able to share interfaces publicly rather sooner than later.

[Hendrik_Yang]

Password-protected Interface Designer is quintessential! Bring it on Airtable!

[Justin_Barrett]

Welcome to the community, @Peter_Hase! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: Unfortunately I can’t help you because I’m not an Airtable employee. I and others with the “Community Leader” badge have been recognized by Airtable for our contributions to the community, but we don’t have inside knowledge about release timelines for any new/updated features.

[Michael_Skelly]

You may have already checked them out, but tools like Stacker (disclosure: I built that!) and others can allow you to create sites and customer portals to share your Airtable data externally – including behind a secure password @Hendrick_Yap.

[Dennis_Petrou]

Any idea on when Interfaces may be shareable as view only without giving access to the entire base?

[Hendrik_Yang]

Desperately need this!

[Rachel_Broer]

Any word on the pivot table in interface?