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

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

Ashok_Kannan:

Is exposing our production data safe?

No.

If your base contains private information, you should make a copy of the base, fill the base with only sample data that you deem safe to publish to the world, then publish the base with sample data. This recommendation has been stated earlier in this thread and in the instruction for publishing a base on the universe.

[kuovonne]

Brennan_Ward:

Are Automations allowed

I’ll let Jordan give the official answer, but in my opinion, automations should be allowed, and I cannot find any text regarding their use in the contest rules.

Automations serve an important part of a base, just like table and field definitions. An interface cannot stand on its own without the underlying tables and fields. Neither should an interface be forced to stand without automations, if automations are appropriate.

[Brennan_Ward]

I do agree - But the fact that automations do not convey with published bases makes me fear they will be irrelevant to this particular contest. Either a serious limitation, or interesting challenge - depending on how you look at it :slightly_smiling_face:

[Tim_Mackey]

Yikes, is this still true? I assumed when I saw this contest that this limitation when publishing bases had been removed—all of the most useful features I’ve developed so far with Interfaces depend in part on Automations…

[kuovonne]

Brennan_Ward:

But the fact that automations do not convey with published bases makes me fear they will be irrelevant to this particular contest.

Wow. I did not realize this. The last time I published a base to the Universe was before automations were released. I simply assumed that since automations are duplicated when a base is duplicated that they would also be duplicated when copying a base from the Universe, but you’re right, they aren’t.

@Jordan_Scott1 Can you please look into this? Automations are an important part of a base, and not being able to publish automations through the Universe is a big limitation. (Or perhaps there is a poorly documented setting, like the hidden setting for including scripts in Universe bases?)

[Brennan_Ward]

@Jordan_Scott1 Any updates on this? Would love to know if I need to proceed with building interfaces without automations for this contest.

[Cheryl_Rae]

@Jordan_Scott1 I just entered this contest but noticed that we give an address for the db we are using - but not the interface… I named the interface of course, but do you just go in and grab it? I noticed the interface was not part of the db copied to the universe… just want to make sure I entered everything correctly.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

@Cheryl_Rae
I asked this same question and she answered in the post below mine:

The Interface Designer Contest :fire: Announcements

@Jordan_Scott1 I’m not sure I understand how the submission works. All I’m asked to provide is a link to the base I’ve published in the Universe… but how do your judges get access to the Interface? When a user copies a base from the Universe, does it come along with the Interfaces that base was tied to in the originating base? If so, this is not at all clear to me from the Universe publishing instructions, or from the structure of the Universe. Before I make my submissions for this contest, wo…

[Cheryl_Rae]

@Jordan_Scott1 I also need to know about the automations as we have a couple of them in our database for entry. And if automations are not copied with the database… our entry will not look as cool as it really is…

[Patrick_Kopitz]

@Jordan_Scott1 Hello. Seems we have the same questions here.
1/ Are you sure that when you publish a base in Universe, that it will also include the interfaces for users outside our organisation that would copy that base?
2/ Talking about contest, we would also much like to submit a full use case that solves a problem. Currently an Interface just using the available elements is quite limited and we also use automations to show the full potential of using interfaces. We see an interface as being like a final product/solution where a user should not even need to go into the base or tables, so if the contest is to create some interfaces that just use the available elements, it really limits the creativity and even more the "functional & actionable (25%) criteria in the judging criteria.

Looking forward to your answers/proposals :slightly_smiling_face: