We are so excited to introduce our newest app building experience, the Visual Builder! With the new Quickbase Visual Builder, you can create tables, add fields, and create relationships, all by simply dragging and dropping items onto the page. Using the visual builder, you can test out configurations to determine the best data model for an app. Read the full release notes here.
As we roll out this new feature, I’d like to give everyone a glimpse behind the curtains and share how our product development values and best practices have made us who we are – and help us deliver powerful features like the Visual Builder.
Over the course of the last two decades, the Quickbase team has spent a lot of time working with customers to build the best platform possible. This experience has helped us to identify countless important learnings that we believe other businesses and app builders can benefit from as well. Our best practices are embedded in every feature release, and the new Visual Builder provides us with a great opportunity to illustrate some of those processes.
Innovation from the Ground Up
Innovation happens when those who are most familiar with their own challenges are empowered to take action to solve them. Businesses that give a voice to knowledgeable stakeholders at every level are able to vastly increase their pool of resources, providing crucial insights and unlocking efficient new processes. These insights can not only spur internal growth, but also give clarity to customer pain.
Quickbase has always advocated the practice of empowering people closest to the work to solve their own problems, and we really put this into practice ourselves when we held an internal Hack-a-thon last year. Teams of Quickbase employees came together to leverage their deep customer empathy in order to create and present the ideas they felt would most benefit customers. The winning team got the whole company excited when they showcased the very first iteration of the Visual Builder which we are now making available to everyone in our product.
Simplicity
Power and usability are often considered to be zero-sum; that is, powerful platforms must be indecipherably technical, while easy-to-use platforms must have limited functionality. At Quickbase, it’s the balance between these two extremes where we see customers finding real value. That’s the reason why “Simplicity” is one of the three key pillars of the Quickbase platform, along with “Power” and “Trust.” As a platform for builders of every level of experience, we believe that it’s essential for us to maintain a high degree of functionality and governance while also continuously improving the ease of use.
The Visual Builder epitomizes our Simplicity pillar. The experience is purpose-built to be clear and illustrative, appealing to builders who prefer to get hands-on with maps and diagrams instead of configuration pages or code. While the Visual Builder may be starting off its life as an intuitive new way to build apps, we will also be adding more power to this feature in several phases over the coming months. By continuing to introduce deeper functionality while maintaining the intuitive nature of the drag-and-drop experience, we believe that result will be a tool that is useful to both new and advanced app builders. Individuals from all areas of a business will be able utilize it to create their solutions faster and more easily than ever.
Quickbase Runs on Quickbase
The road to delivering value is paved with customer empathy. Whether a business is trying to develop new products, or simply looking for a little efficiency, the best solutions will always be found by constantly putting on the shoes of customers. Even for our customers who are building light-weight Quickbase apps, we believe that this is the key to truly understanding the pains that need to be addressed and finding the best way to solve them.
The good news is that Quickbase runs on Quickbase, meaning that we run most of our own business processes on the same platform that our customers do. (Read more about our HR team and IT team use Quickbase.)
This idea of being our own customer allows every Quickbase employee to empathize with the needs and wants of other builders across the globe, and is the main reason that the new Visual Builder now exists. By running our business on Quickbase, we ensure that every employee is filled to the brim with ideas for product innovation that can provide huge benefit our customers. We plan to continue to use this philosophy to guide us as we look for more opportunities to delight our customers.
Check Out the Visual App Builder
Now that you know why we are so dedicated to making it easier to create and manage Quickbase applications, we can’t wait for you to try the new Visual Builder. Concepts like tables and relationships are easy to understand now that anyone can try out different configurations and even make changes on the fly. We believe that everyone will benefit from this interactive experience, and we can’t wait to see what you build.
Start a free trial or join our Builder Program to get started today!
