The Interface Designer Contest 🔥

[Jordan_Scott1]

Hi all - I hope you’re doing well!

I’m excited to announce the Interface Designer Contest.

We have been so impressed by what the community has been able to accomplish with Interface Designer so far, and can’t wait to be inspired by your creativity. This contest will be open through August 12, 2022 at 5pm PT and winners will be announced in late August.

More details can be found below. Happy building 🙂

The categories:

1. Best design: The most intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Not just visually appealing, but also functional.
2. Best use case/solution focus: The best example of using an Interface to solve a problem for a specific use case or function, for example, Marketing or Product Ops.
3. Wildcard: Just have fun and build something cool.

The prizes (for each category):

• First place: $5,000, Airtable swag bag, & an invitation to an Interface Designer feedback session with the Airtable product team
• Second place: $2,000, Airtable swag bag, & an invitation to an Interface Designer feedback session with the Airtable product team
• Third place: $1,000, Airtable swag bag, & an invitation to an Interface Designer feedback session with the Airtable product team

Judging criteria:

• Creativity (25%) - The extent to which the interface shows creativity and showcases a use case that has never been possible until now. Creative use of advanced features like user filters.
• Impact (25%) - The extent to which the Interface unlocks new user value and addresses a need. What is the magnitude of the impact delivered to the user?
• Design (25%) - Ease of use, design & UI/UX. Is the solution intuitive and elegant? Is user navigation easy and simple?
• Functional & Actionable (25%) - Quality of submission, lack of errors, seamless experience for the end-user. How ready is this for collaboration and interaction from others?

The details:

• Submissions are limited to 1 submission per category per person.
• You will need to publish your base to Airtable Universe for submission. Details on how to publish to universe can be found here.
• Submit your Interface here
• Tip: if you need a dataset to get started, the data.world community is free and a great place to start!

Detailed terms & conditions can be found here

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open to legal residents of the 50 United States and D.C., Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, European Union, and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are age 18 or older and who are current Airtable subscribers. Void where prohibited. Odds of winning depend on number of entries received. Contest starts at 12:00 a.m. EST on June 1 and ends at 11:59:59 p.m. EST on July 31. Each Category’s ARV of prizes: First place ($5,000), Second place ($2,000), Third place ($1,000). ARV of all prizes $25,000. For full Official Rules, prize disclosures, and to enter, review this page. Sponsored by Formagrid Inc, dba Airtable Attn: Airtable Legal Department, 799 Market Street, 8th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94103

[Kamille_Parks]

Jordan_Scott1:

an invitation to an Interface Designer feedback session with the Airtable product team

:raised_hands:t4: ^ that’s where the heat is

[kuovonne]

Thank you for announcing this contest. It reminds me a bit of the scripting contests that occurred a couple of years ago when scripting was first released. In those contests, participants posted their submissions in a contest thread on this forum. For this contest, do you want to encourage or discourage people from posting their submissions to this thread?

[Karlstens]

This is so exciting! So if I’m understanding the entry conditions correctly, as a Pro subscriber I may enter three times, one entry for each category.

May I ask, are there any planned new features for Interface Designer to be released during the competition time, and if so, could we have their release dates to help plan for them? Or, is what we have at this point in time with Interfaces unchanging for the duration of the competition?

[Jordan_Scott1]

Correct! You may enter 3 times, 1 per category :slightly_smiling_face:

Let me follow up and see if anything is confirmed next month!

[Jordan_Scott1]

Would love for everyone to share if you’re comfortable doing so :star_struck:

[Tobias_LGKR]

That’s a great idea. But unfortunately sharing base data is out of the question for us. Have fun everyone!

[Jordan_Scott1]

Anonymized data is definitely welcome as well :slightly_smiling_face:

[kuovonne]

@Jordan_Scott1
I believe that the Scripting contests occurred before you joined Airtable, so I would like to remind you of this thread. As you can see in the thread, Airtable released a number of changes to Scripting right when the contest ended. The changes included both new features and breaking changes. The timing of these changes was problematic. The breaking changes broke scripts that were submitted. And the timing of the new features meant that none of the scripts submitted for the contest took advantage of those features, and may have employed workarounds that were made obsolete by those features.

I really hope that there aren’t similar issues with this contest. While I don’t anticipate issues with breaking changes, I hope that the contest end date takes into account project release dates for any new features. For example, there are currently workarounds regarding common tasks in interfaces that may become obsolete. Having people work on polishing interfaces that are soon obsolete leaves the creator frustrated at spending time on something obsolete; it leaves the universe cluttered with obsolete ways of doing things; and it puts judges in a position of deciding how to deal with these solutions.

[ScottWorld]

kuovonne:

I really hope that there aren’t similar issues with this contest. While I don’t anticipate issues with breaking changes, I hope that the contest end date takes into account project release dates for any new features. For example, there are currently workarounds regarding common tasks in interfaces that may become obsolete. Having people work on polishing interfaces that are soon obsolete leaves the creator frustrated at spending time on something obsolete; it leaves the universe cluttered with obsolete ways of doing things; and it puts judges in a position of deciding how to deal with these solutions.

You bring up some excellent points here. There is nothing coming that should break the existing interfaces, but Airtable has already committed to at least 3 new Interface features in July 2022, which will make people’s existing Interface workarounds obsolete before the contest is even complete.

These 3 changes are: (1) the ability to create new records in Interfaces, (2) the ability to trigger automations from interface buttons, and (3) the new navigation features. All of this is coming in July 2022, right in the middle of the contest.

This not only (a) makes the creators of the Contest Interfaces look bad & feel frustrated, but (b) it actually hurts Airtable as a product, because Airtable is actively encouraging the publishing of outdated & old ways of doing things in their Universe which don’t properly showcase the possibilities of Airtable in the proper light.

From a larger perspective, I’m additionally concerned about Airtable’s growing lack of cohesiveness across the product line. It seems like nobody is taking a “bird’s eye view” of the entire product. For example, they talk about enhancing interface buttons to finally trigger automations, but there is no talk about enhancing buttons in the grid view to trigger automations.

We already see this disparity with buttons now, with the 2 different button types doing 2 different things. The 2 different button types should actually be merged as 1 button type with the same list of features (and sure, some features can be disabled if they don’t work right now — such as launching extensions or running scripts).

[Jose_Alberto_Fu]

You’re right Scott. I agree Airtable should wait to a more mature version of interfaces to launch a design contest. We all are waiting also for a interfaces sharing scheme. There are a lot of front end and app no code builders alternatives for Airtable out there and interfaces could be the best of them.