Case Study

Action Builder

Glide is the app development platform that allows anyone to turn spreadsheets into powerful, intuitive, and beautiful apps without code. With the mission to make the power of software development accessible to all, the biggest design challenge is distilling the complex concepts of programming into approachable, intuitive UI elements.
I was the first hire in this YC-backed startup and tasked with taking ownership over the Glide Builder, the interface where developers would configure their app components and apply logic and structure to app interactions. This work included coming up with a flexible and sustainable system of interactive elementsthat could grow to accomodate more powerful features over time and give a sense of predictability and cohesion across all modes of configuration.

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Role: Product Designer

Product Team: Antonio Garcia Aprea, Jason Smith (engineering)

Forking below each step

Logic flowcharts of a programming model involves a lot of overlapping branching. For first-time users new to programming concepts, following the trail of conditions to the action here is meandering and it’s hard to see the relationship between all of the triggers and actions.

Top to bottom, left to right

In order to make it easier to read each family of actions, we designed the branching structure to follow a rigorous top-down left-right sequence. The result requires more horizontal space, but makes the result much easier to read.