This approach keeps novices (and even seasoned users as they progress toward that Millennium Falcon high ceiling) engaged and on track as they build out more and more from the software’s low floor. You could then click on a button for calendar view and the information will be displayed in that way, allowing you to stick with it or revert to your initial plan. Then, says Ofstad, if you’re maybe entering calendar dates, there may be a prompt to try the calendar view. Users are only shown as much as they need to take a few first steps to get started. The total power of how Airtable works and what it is capable of is pretty much hidden at first. Learning needs to happen in stages.” This notion of progressive disclosure is meant to give new users an ‘aha moment’ almost immediately so they feel successful and in sync with what they’re doing. Terms like ‘fields’ and ‘records’ are confusing and don’t mean anything to most people. When most people start using Airtable, they don’t know what a database is. “You don’t learn Airtable in a day,” he says. That is purposeful and is meant to offer a soft start to new users who may otherwise feel burdened by too many options, or bells and whistles.“ Ramp up with progressive disclosureĪs users make their way through Airtable’s offerings, says Ofstad, options progressively present themselves in a slow build it is called guided onboarding. Says Ofstad: “We start with a known concept and build a bridge from it.” When you first open Airtable, it feels an awful lot like a spreadsheet. But we have to make sure we aren’t doing that at the cost of product simplicity: the low floor and the high ceiling.” One important way Airtable does that is through design decisions that aren’t about creating novelty, but establishing something familiar and safe-feeling. “The gravitational pull of the business is to make it more complex and add more features,” says Ofstad. For a deeper dive into the backbone of the company’s design philosophy, consider the following tenets that help make Airtable a simple interface with infinite possibilities. Ofstad has said this tension between a low floor and a high ceiling is what differentiates Airtable from its competitors (of which there are now many:, Asana, Smartsheet are just a few) and what informed its most recent offering,Interface Designer, which allows anyone in an organization to build visual apps to cover off any number of projects. Ofstad and Liu have been incredibly successful at striking a balance for their customers between a low barrier to entry and an incredibly high ceiling for innovation.
Others have turned Airtable into a tool to plan marketing campaigns, map out events, and even manage hobbies such as book clubs, craft supplies or recipe databases. At the same time Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ effort to launch space vehicles, has used the system to track rocket parts.
In fact, use cases could not be more disparate: The April 2017 issue of Idaho Farm Bureau’s Producer details how one McKay, ID-based cattle rancher named Brett Zollinger used Airtable to manage his herd and seamlessly log and connect cattle vaccinations, pregnancy checks, and other records in one place.
#Airtable database how to#
It is, so far, a design-led success story and one that offers a handful of lessons on how to build a product with an open-ended use case.
#Airtable database series#
In December 2021, the company announced $735 million in series F funding (which brought total investment to $1.36 billion) and clocked a valuation of $11 billion. With 850 employees and 300,000 organizations using the program every day, Airtable is in extreme growth mode. Answering that question has brought Airtable and its founders to an incredibly exciting point in the company’s trajectory.
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