New: Overview Layout in Interfaces

[Ayesha_Bose]

Hello! I’m Ayesha, a Product Manager here at Airtable. We’re so excited to share an improvement to interfaces that will let you create a new layout to help provide an overview for your app. With this new layout type, you can easily add text blocks, bookmarks, and links, and even customize it with a logo and cover image.

Interfaces are built for collaboration. We’ve seen so many customers create amazing apps with Interfaces that help their team members:

• Know exactly where to go and what to do in an app
• Focus on the information that matters to them
• Use pages that are designed specifically for their work

With our new Overview layout, you can build a new front page for your app – providing important context for your team, highlighting the most critical pages within your app, and giving new users a clear place to start. We can’t wait to see what you build with this!

What is the Overview layout? 

This is a new page type that will let you configure:

• Title
• Description
• Custom cover image and logo
• Bookmarks: you can add a bookmark to any page in your app
• Text blocks
• Sidebar: this will add a secondary space to add more information in addition to links to external resources.

How do you create a page with this layout?

• Within the edit mode in the Interfaces tab, you can click the + sign on the left side of the screen to add a new page.
• In the layout picker, you can choose the Overview option.
• We’ll get you started with some quick links and examples of how you can configure this page, but you can customize this page to make it your own.

Other common questions:

• When should I use this layout?
• For apps that have a lot of sections and pages. This can help point your team to the most important areas within your app
• For apps that will be shared with a large audience. This can be a great place to add more context in text blocks to make sure everyone understands your app

• Is this supported on mobile?
• Not yet, but this is coming soon!

• Who can see bookmarks?
• Bookmarks to Interface pages only show for users with access to those pages. If an entire group of bookmarks is not accessible to a user, it won’t be displayed.

• Other questions? Check out our support article.

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We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, please let us know if you have any questions.

This will be slowly rolling out to customers over the next couple of weeks. If you’re an enterprise customer, please reach out to your account manager with any questions.

[David_Beedle]

Fantastic. I've been waiting for this! Thank you.

[Sistema_Aotearo]

I like this!

I had been building a similar thing on a website. It's just a page with buttons to link my team to the right places. I can now hopefully replace the website entirely!

I'd love to be able to embed this to my site with the new "Share Publically" feature, but that's not an option yet. It could then act as a homepage for my apps with a custom URL.

[David_Beedle]

Following up after playing with this for the afternoon ...

It's a much needed interface page addition and happy it exists. I just wish it had more formatting and graphic options. Without the option to add even a small splash of color, or a separator of some kind to guide the end-users eye, any page with a lot of bookmarks is a sea of black and white and same-colored arrows.

As I said it's still early days, so maybe I haven't explored thoroughly enough. 

As always, I'm excited to see what Airtable brings us next.

[Chase]

Can bookmarks direct to external URLs like buttons? Or direct to a separate interface within other workspaces?

[David_Beedle]

Looks to me like bookmarks only go to Interface pages. Looks like there is a optional "sidebar" that allows for external links.

[Alejof]

@Ayesha_Bose  Unbelievable, I wanted to try it, but in all the created bases I get this error and it doesn't work for me. I tried on all bases 

[Alejof]

@Ayesha_Bose  I have found a bug. The new Layout does not work in Spanish language, I have changed the language and now it works. 😂 

[atusr]

Please allow us to share interfaces pages publicly under our own domain.

[Coups]

Loving this new layout, really useful to point my team to the right pages in our App, quickly!

I have noticed that my banner image keeps disappearing / being removed after publishing it for some reason? 🤔

Thanks for the update!

[Lclore]

Im loving this new interface. Im using it to give each employee a workflow: Click this and do it, then this and do that. Two things that I'd LOVE to see added to these that would empower that is: 1. Ability to link to specific records in another interface. I want to tag SOP's (that live as a specific record that have their own interface page). I could do this with a URL even I just would like it to be in the Left Column. 2. I'd love the ability to add an interface page more than one time. A few of these steps revisit the same interface. I'd love to have the ability to "go to calendar" twice during the work flow. In essense. I want the interface to not disappear in the bookmarks option.