I love that the Automations and Data and Interfaces are now on the top nav bar - what would be even better is that if they remained there when looking at a specific interface and there was also a return to home on there too
the navigation from a given interface to the underlying data or to another base is very clumsy.
Probably not an oversight. One of the top things people want from Interfaces is to divorce it from the Base experience. Meaning handing someone an Interface and not expecting them to look at the Data or Automations.
This was almost certainly done on purpose, for that reason. Didn’t they say they were working on giving access to just an Interface and not a Page? The decision to remove the nav bar to get into the rest of the base while looking at an Interface is in line with that potential functionality.
The navigation bar at the top should likely be there when you’re editing an Interface Page, but not when you’re viewing a published Page.
thanks for that perspective i will watch to see how it plays out - in the meantime it is frustrating rather than a deal breaker and may as you say be more optimal with a broader roll out of interfaces with an audience we want to keep away from the raw data in table format
I think that the nav bar definitely needs to be there when editing the interface for sure (no question about that), but the vast majority of my customers would also like the nav bar to be there when interacting with published interfaces as well.
Currently, there is no way to deny collaborators from seeing the entire base, so this fits perfectly with how Airtable currently functions.
However, for Airtable’s future functionality where interfaces will be able to be shared with the public & where interfaces will be able to be shared with advanced user permissions, then I can see hiding the Nav Bar under those circumstances, because the Nav Bar would be irrelevant & unnecessary.
Do we know that? This sounds like the opposite of what I would expect of most users. The point of looking at a published Interface is that you’re not looking at the “data”. So why would the vast majority of users need or want to routinely switch back and forth?
Not sure, but I can only report that the #1 question my interface customers ask me is: “Is there any easier way to get back to my actual Airtable base?” They also call it their “actual” base, which I love because it shows a nice understanding of data vs. interface. Lol.
From my point of view, it seems like the easy answer here is for Airtable to simply make the toolbar dynamic. In other words, the navigation toolbar should either appear or disappear, based on the permission level of the person interacting with the interface.
i think that is right - what my team tend to have is an interface which they use for tracking progress (like a dashboard) but move to a specific working view of the data to do much of the interaction - one factor here is the ease of sorting, grouping etc for different data management - it may be that our users have more interaction with much of the data than the average use case
