Quickbase Empower 2023 has concluded, leaving us thrilled with the remarkable insights and exciting prospects ahead. We have prepared a concise summary of the event's key highlights for those who were unable to attend.
Amidst the wealth of valuable information shared in the comprehensive collection of how-to's, product spotlights, and customer stories, we couldn't help but observe some recurring themes throughout the day: ease of use, reduced barriers to entry, and modernization. Below are our biggest takeaways, all of which emphasize the importance of user-friendly experiences, accessibility, and staying current with the latest advancements.
1. The New Form Builder is Awesome
Ryan Murray, Senior Product Manager, and Jeff Chause, UX Manager, delivered a really informative session on the new forms builder, mentioning how revamping forms had been a a main focus of the team at Quickbase for 18 or so months. By the end of the nearly 30 minute session, one thing was clear: Ease of use and a modernization is at the forefront of Quickbase's mind.
During the session, one quote stood out and lingered in our minds. Jeff expressed a pivotal objective in developing the new forms: not only to "make it easy to make a good form" but, perhaps even more crucially, to "make it hard to make a bad form" This insightful statement highlights the team's unwavering commitment to delivering an exceptional form-building experience, further emphasizing themes of ease of use, modernization and lower barrier's to entry.
Let's dive into some of the primary features being introduced and explore why they are set to make a significant impact.
1. Intuitive and Dynamic Form Resizing
Gone are the days of rigid, fixed-size forms that don't adapt to your needs. With Quickbase's intuitive and dynamic form resizing feature, users can now flexibly adjust their forms the content being entered. Whether your form contains a handful of fields or a multitude of sections, the form can be easily resized, rearranged and reformatted to accommodate the data, providing a seamless and visually appealing user experience. This enhancement ensures that your forms look sleek and professional, regardless of the amount of information being captured.
2. Customizable Field Grouping
Organizing and categorizing fields has never been easier. Quickbase now allows you to create customizable field groups within your forms that automatically resize upon being pieced together. This feature empowers you to group related fields together, making it simpler for users to navigate and complete the form efficiently. By customizing field grouping, you can align the form's structure with your specific workflow, enhancing usability and optimizing data entry. Say goodbye to cluttered forms and welcome a more streamlined and organized approach to data collection.
3. Automatic Reformatting for Tablets and Mobile Devices
In today's mobile-driven world, it's crucial to have forms that adapt seamlessly to various devices. Quickbase understands this need and has introduced automatic reformatting for tablets and mobile devices. Now, your forms will automatically adjust their layout and design when accessed on tablets or smartphones, ensuring optimal readability and usability. This responsiveness eliminates the need for separate forms or clunky workarounds, enabling users to effortlessly interact with your forms on any device, anywhere.
These new features, along with a clearly modernized UI, represent a significant leap forward in the evolution of Quickbase forms. By embracing intuitive and dynamic form resizing, customizable field grouping, and automatic reformatting for tablets and mobile devices, Quickbase empowers users to collect data more effectively and enhance the user experience. With these enhancements, you can streamline your data collection processes, improve productivity, and achieve greater data accuracy.
2. Improving Quickbase Mobile is a Top Priority
Kaydee Gilson, Interaction Designer, and Paulina Georgieva, Product Manager, took the stage for a dynamic 20-minute session, shedding light on the exciting future of Quickbase Mobile. While Quickbase has consistently improved and evolved its platform, it's no secret that the mobile experience has been long overdue for a revamp. The fact that it has become a prominent focus at both this year's and last year's Empower conferences is certainly encouraging.
The dedication to revitalizing Quickbase Mobile is evident as significant efforts are being invested to breathe new life into the mobile experience. The primary objective appears to be aligning it closely with the desktop experience, while still preserving the unique qualities that mobile devices offer.
Touch-centric design principles are at the forefront of Quickbase Mobile's development. This involves implementing larger touch targets, optimizing spacing between interactive elements, and embracing intuitive gestures like swiping and pinching for seamless navigation and interaction. Noteworthy enhancements are on the horizon, including the introduction of mobile dashboards, tabs and filters, and new table report widgets.
While there is more to come for Quickbase Mobile, it's evident that the team is diligently working to deliver an exceptional mobile experience. By bridging the gap between desktop and mobile, Quickbase aims to provide users with a consistent and intuitive interface, ensuring that the power and versatility of Quickbase can be harnessed seamlessly anywhere, at anytime.
3. Quickbase is Fully Embracing The Age of AI
Artificial intelligence has rapidly become increasingly prevalent, seemingly transitioning overnight. Rather than shying away from this transformative technology, Quickbase is boldly embracing it. The possibilities they are exploring for AI implementation are truly groundbreaking, showcasing their commitment to innovation and pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
Georgi Peev, Product Manager at Quickbase, delivered a compelling 20-minute presentation that explored the exciting intersection of AI and Quickbase. Delving into the possibilities of this fusion, Peev highlighted several key talking points that took center stage:
1. Smart Builder
Creating Quickbase applications can be challenging, particularly for inexperienced users, often leading to a cumbersome development process. Given that, it's no surprise that approximately 20% of Quickbase applications originate from preexisting applications in the Quickbase App Exchange. However, even with existing applications as a starting point, users can still encounter roadblocks during development. That's precisely where Smart Builder steps in.
Smart Builder addresses this issue by leveraging 20 years' worth of Quickbase activity data to provide real-time, personalized recommendations when users create new tables or fields. By analyzing the structure of your application, Smart Builder offers tailored guidance on the next steps to take based on previous application's overlap.
This breakthrough functionality empowers Quickbase users to build their applications with more speed, clarity, and confidence, in turn making the development process easier than ever before.
2. Data Analyzer
The primary goal of of Data Analyzer is to deliver deep, actionable insights for your business. Data management can be tricky, and not everyone has a data analyst on their team, let alone an entire team of them.
That's where Data Analyzer comes in. By a user simply providing the data to be analyzed and the outcome to be predicted, Data Analyzer will find statistical trends in the data that will contribute towards that outcome, revealing correlations and insights never before seen. The image below provides an example of what this process may look like.
Additionally, each analysis/model is presented as a Quickbase formula that can be copy and pasted, then deployed into your application, enabling you to get live predictions on all of your records (including new ones).
3. The Future of AI in Quickbase
Some other ideas that leverage AI that are being considered by Quickbase (but not finalized) include:
Finding - finding specific settings, help articles, community posts, etc.
Building - help with building apps, creating pipelines, writing formulas, custom reports, etc.
Explaining - getting insights into how something works in your app, where data is from, etc.
Using - driving efficiency for end users by automatically summarizing/categorizing records
All in all, Quickbase's Empower 2023 was an absolutely incredible event. Immersed in the wealth of sessions throughout the day, it became abundantly clear that Quickbase's future is nothing short of brilliant. Being a part of this journey fills us with immense joy and excitement. Brace yourself, because the Quickbase revolution is just beginning, and we're thrilled to be right in the midst of it all. Rewatch Empower 2023 using the button below.