An analogy for how Airtable’s design team thinks about our work
My son turned 2 during quarantine, and entered his LEGO phase. Against the competition of modern sound-and-light-emitting toys, it’s a marvel that LEGOs have remained an enduring fascination for kids. Produced since 1934, these simple shapes provide a timeless canvas for creativity through their universal composability:
Lego bricks from 1958 still interlock with those made in the current time… Six bricks of 2 × 4 studs can be combined in 915,103,765 ways [source]
Kids and adults can be inspired by fully realized creations that others have made, start a new creation from scratch, or mix-and-match pieces from different sets to create something entirely new.
At Airtable, we want software to be as flexible, creative and powerful as LEGO. We think about software as a similar “kit of simple building blocks” which click together to make almost anything imaginable. All the software we use in our lives is a combination of roughly similar components: a way to store data, a website or app to show that data, and some rules for what should happen in the app and when.
But today that ability to build is available only to people who know how to code. Our work at Airtable is to create a simple interface for each “building block” in software engineering, so anyone can create what they want without code.
With LEGO, there are different categories of blocks: bricks, plates, trees, dinosaurs, etc. What’s the equivalent for software?
We look to the field of software engineering for some frameworks. Code-based software is typically broken down into three main pillars: model, view and controller:
We make building blocks in each of these categories:
This CS101 is a helpful conceptual framework, but it’s not product design. What does our design team actually do?
People use the tool of Airtable to make other tools that solve problems in their lives and organizations. While MVC is a useful way of understanding the tool part, it doesn’t have much to say about the problem part. Get too deep in the theory and you lose sight of the purpose, or as they say in business schools: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
So as designers at Airtable, we’re asking ourselves:
We use these questions to choose the right building blocks, then design an abstraction and interface to each block make sense and fit together well with other pieces (just like LEGO). Then rinse and repeat for new blocks.
I lead our Platform Design Team, where much of our work focuses on the controller layer. We know that software has “logic” and “brains” but — so what? What kinds of real human problems can be solved with this logic?
Below are a few specific examples of the types of problems we are interested in making new blocks for. (And because I wouldn’t be writing a Medium post about work unless I was recruiting: We’re hiring designers to lead each of these areas.)
Workflows
The world’s most impactful projects require people working together, often through an intricate series of work handoffs through time and space. Done well, this adds structure and predictability to the messy process of human collaboration.
But it’s hard to do it well, especially at scale. How do organizations coordinate this work when it gets too complex? In the analogue world, people use flowcharts, which work for a while until you discover that the Pentagon needed this for understanding their procurement process:
This is surely too much complexity to understand, much less make thoughtful optimizations and improvements.
Can we do better with software? We’re asking ourselves:
Connectivity
Most interesting insights don’t come from a single data source. For example, if you’re Meow Wolf and you’re building an immersive physical art space, you’re looking at data spanning “exhibitions, characters, scripts, merchandise, and more‚ [and] ‘some way of gauging how they are connected across mediums, divisions, and formats.’” But today the average company uses 1200+ cloud services, so simply finding the right data and making the connections can make you feel like Charlie:
We’ve built some powerful underlying Sync technology to automatically import data from many external services (or other bases in Airtable), apply the structure of a relational database, and make it available for exploration or manipulation. Now we’re thinking ahead to what interfaces can be built on top of this technology:
Formulas
One of the most basic problems people want to solve with computers is “take this data, and transform it into another piece of data.” For decades, software has let people do this with formulas. Formulas are the OG low-code, one of the very first ways that non-developers understood the flexible, manipulable software. It’s like the math you learned in school, only it does more.
Yet despite nearly 40 years of incredible developments in the usability and sophistication of software, formulas work pretty much the same as they did in the Carter administration. Not only that, they aren’t even as popular as you might think: Only 7% of Excel spreadsheets contain formulas.
So we’re starting to ask: What opportunities exist to make step function improvements in the usability and power of formulas? We’re just embarking on this work, but here are some very early ideas we’re pursuing: