Introducing Interface Designer 🎉

Woo hoo!! Gigantic day for Airtable!! These new features are game changing!! :partying_face:

Possibly life changing, but definitely game changing. :winking_face:

Looks very promising!

One wish The Interface Designer would be perfect for creating easy-to-use apps for clients that do not have access to a base or workspace. Eg. when a client needs to be able to see statuses on video productions and be able to approve them.

So the ability to share an “access without an account” interface with a client would be amazing. Any plans on this?

The “for now” qualifier in this line from the announcement above gives me hope that non-user access may be in the works:

Brilliant! Been playing with this all afternoon already. By any chance are you going to adding password protection to shared interfaces? That would be an absolute game changer for me!

WHOA, what just dropped?

Thank you so much for this!

I couldn’t wait to start playing with it. Here is an initial attempt at building an interface for creating a new record with data validation.

It runs off of formula fields and a single automation script.

@Jordan_Scott1:

@Justin_Barrett noticed that certain components are only available with the built-in templates. For example, the “Record List” component is only available in the pre-made “Record review” layout, but if we make a new interface from scratch, we don’t have access to the “Record List” component.

It would be nice if we had access to all components from all interfaces, regardless of whether we start from a template or build our own interface from scratch.

SOOO Cool Kuovonne! Thanks again for pushing me to learn java script, it’s been a huge game changer and now even more so with this new release. My homework for tonight is replicating your demo!

Is this going to become a paid feature once it gets out of beta? I just don’t want to spend time playing around and learning about it if I won’t be able to use it once it moves out of beta.

Great to see that the team has a long horizon concerning accessibility to custom interfaces and a big THANK YOU to the team!

Another aspect of agility is the reusability of interfaces that users create. I assume an interface is bound to a specific base - i.e., the base it was created it. Are such interfaces portable to other bases? Or, are they bound to the data? Slightly relevant…

That’s a really good question and probably good enough for a sandwich bet. I’ll bet a fine turkey sandwich this will be free forever.

If interfaces transitions to a paid feature, you will continue to be able to use any interfaces you have already made, per this support page.

While Interface Designer is available for all customers to use for free during beta, it will be subject to pricing and packaging restrictions down the road. After the beta ends, your workspace will retain access to any interfaces you build during the beta regardless of your Airtable plan.

Yes, so far, in my personal experience, code reusability is a power as long as it is taken into account from the beginning of any code development.

Thanks to those who made me aware of this very early.

In the NOcode scenario I quoted, I experienced bad trip while had to recreate the new interface from scratch, whats caused me to run back to reUsable js Components !

(and a huge lot of js coding time too, but once per UI Component(s), not many !)

In the case of Airtable Interface Design, I join questions I quoted!

oLπ

@Jordan_Scott1 and the Airtable marketing team,

Genius marketing video. I loved it - basically as much as I love the feature. Videos like that deserve to be made (and money spent on them) simply for their own sake as works of art. Great work!

I think this is pretty smart - it incentivizes everyone to jump on this train early and with exuberance.

Also a really good sign. While I’m betting that this feature will be inclusive for even the free accounts, I give my wager a 1-in-4 chance of paying off given today’s data and my inexperience using it. I believe (if fee-bound) it falls into the class of taxing customers for doing the heavy lifting of enhancing their apps, a really bad path for Airtable to be on. The most ideal way to gate payment levels is performance-based (record collections, etc), not feature based.

I think @ScottWorld intimated this is [possibly] a game-changer; I think he’s right. That’s twice in the past two weeks I have agreed with him. Given this is an early beta, we can probably expect to see some startling enhancements on the horizon.

@kuovonne - you’re pretty experienced with Interfaces already and I’m curious about this scenario -

• User in a company (or consultant) spends 20 hours setting up the most perfect interface for base (a).


• Another group (or client) needs the same interface, but in base (b).

Does the user (or consultant) have to recreate the new interface from scratch?

If you duplicate an existing base, the interfaces are in the duplicate base.

If you want to reuse an interface in an already existing base, you need to recreate them manually. This is the same restriction with apps and automations–they are tied to the base and to get them in an existing base, they must be recreated manually.

On the other hand, much of the time spent setting up an interface is the design process. Even if it takes 20 hours setting up an interface, it should take much less time to re-create it (assuming that it is a straight recreation with no design changes).

Can you please clarify? We can already use conditional logic to when deciding when to trigger automations. Do you mean that you are adding conditional logic for determining what automation actions will run after the automation is triggered? If so, adding branching logic to an automation’s actions is a most welcome feature.

correct, we’re entering beta for adding branching logic to an automation’s actions

Awesome! Can’t wait to see what you create, @JonathanB . We haven’t explored password protection for interfaces, but we do have improvements to our permissions capabilities as a top priority, which should help you control who has access to Interfaces, and everything else, in Airtable. Stay tuned for updates! I’ll pass this specific feedback about password protection along to the team!

Thank you for the feedback @Mathias_Elmose ! We’re so glad you’re excited about Interface Designer. Our team is looking closely at our existing permissions structure, which we hope will make it easier to manage clients or collaborators who don’t need full access to your Airtable Base but do need to contribute to your workflow. Stay tuned!

This is incredibly good news!! The lack of meaningful permission features is the biggest collaboration pain point in Airtable! It is the primary reason we had to par-back our use of Airtable and eventually led to the death of our airtable tool. So excited to hear more!!

This is an excellent addition to Airtable - well done! I spent a bit of time drafting one up and I can already think of so many ways interfaces will help streamline workflows. Interfaces are simply more intuitive than row-based processing for most people; I think a lot of people at my company are going to be very happy with this!

Hi Jordan,

Is a form element for interfaces on the roadmap? I would love to see some native functionality which accomplishes similar data validation as that demoed within Kuovonnes previously posted interface video.

Congratulations to the entire Airtable team. This is a HUGE release and I’m so excited about it.

I have a few questions:

1. Will there be a separate Interface Designer forum category where we can ask questions and submit feedback?


2. How do we participate in the conditional/branching logic beta test? I didn’t see that in my current automations.

Thanks again to the Airtable team for all of the hard work to get us here!

Can we share outside our circle of paid members? Or is that what this is intended for?