For Day 3 of our #100DaysofProduct challenge, I thought of how I could improve Airtable.

I and my friend Chris started this journey to examine 100 different applications across various industries and see how we can improve on them. We hope to learn more about products, product management and creating lasting solutions at the end of this journey.

Airtable

When I first heard about Airtable a couple of years back, I knew it as a more visual and fancy spreadsheet. And till reviewing it, I had never used the application before. Airtable is amazing!

Airtable allows you to organize data, processes, people, workflows and more within your organizations with a ton of powerful easy to use and visually pleasing features. Their mission is to democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs.

Reviewing Airtable was fun and challenging because it was really hard to improve upon. Given that I had never actually used it before, at first glance it seems like it has everything and they have within the past year launched mind blowing features to top it off.

I might have to come back to this one after using the application more, but at a first glance here were some of the features I thought of:

1. Complex querying of data
2. Creating and sharing forms on interface designer
3. Embedding views and interfaces
4. Offline editing

The amazing thing is after a bit of research Airtable has most of these features already! And they even have support docs for the ones that don't exist on work arounds. They also have a strong community that build apps to solve some of these challenges and integrate the apps with Airtable.

Some things like offline editing and embedding interfaces however are yet to be built, so I chose to run with one of them, embedding interface designs on external frontend.

Embedding Interfaces

Interface Designer on Airtable allows people to build their own applications for everything from managing review and approvals, reporting on the progress of campaigns and other work, gathering information from colleagues, and more.

We wanted to improve on users ability to share their interfaces by enabling them embed their interfaces on external frontend or CMS tools like Wordpress.

It's simple, users can copy a block of code and embed their interfaces as iframes on an external frontend.

Here is a PRD I wrote for this enhancement feature.

Would love to hear what you think about this! Drop a comment below.