Workflows are good at doing the work. They're less good at showing it to the people who need to see it, or at letting someone who has never opened the editor start one when they need to. The sales lead wants this week's pipeline at a glance. The office manager wants a button that kicks off onboarding for a new hire. Neither should have to read a workflow to get there.
Today Lodol gets Apps: simple screens you build on top of your workflows, without code, for the rest of your team to use.
Built from widgets
Choose Create and then New App on the Workflows page, switch to Edit, and drag widgets onto the grid. There are fourteen of them in five families:
- Charts: bar, line and donut charts, each of which can also be shown as a table.
- Numbers: a single stat, or a progress meter toward a target.
- Lists: tables, compact lists, and a notes timeline of what happened and when.
- Layout: text, panels that group widgets together, and filters such as a search box or a row of stages.
- Actions: fields, forms and run buttons.
An app can hold up to 50 widgets across as many as 12 screens, and clicking a row can open a screen of its own with that record's details. Give it your brand color, font and corner style, and a light or dark look.
Your data, from your workflows
Each widget gets its data from one of two places. It can show a stored value, something your workflows keep up to date in the workspace, like this month's revenue. Or it can ask a workflow directly: as the screen loads, the app runs a quick workflow and shows what it hands back, so anything a workflow can reach, from your CRM to your books, can end up on the screen. A filter on the screen, or the record someone clicked into, can be passed along as the workflow's inputs.
Before it reaches a widget, data can be shaped without writing anything: keep only the rows that match, sort them, group them, keep the first few, or add them up into a single number. Screens refresh when you ask, or on their own every 1, 5 or 15 minutes.
Screens that read like your work
Tables have a records layout made for lists of people, jobs or orders. Each row becomes one line: the name with a second line under it, the status as a colored pill, marks showing which details are on file, like an email or a phone number, so the gaps stand out, and when it last happened. It reads like a list your team works through, not a spreadsheet.
A button anyone on the team can press
A run button starts a workflow, so the person who needs something done doesn't need to know how it's done. Put "Start onboarding" on an HR app or "Send this week's report now" on a finance one. The button can ask for what it needs when it's pressed, like a name or an amount, or always use the same values, and it can ask for confirmation first. Once pressed, it offers a link to watch the run, which lands in the Runs list like any other.
Fields, forms and notes let people put information in. Each hands what was typed to a workflow you choose, which decides where it goes: a stored value, a spreadsheet, your CRM. A field saves as soon as someone moves on, a form saves when it's submitted, and every save is recorded as a run of that workflow, so there's always a record of who changed what.
None of this fires while you're building. Buttons, fields and forms only act when the app is in use, so rearranging a screen can't set anything off.
Who can use it
Everyone in your workspace can open the apps you build, and people allowed to edit workflows can build and change them. Pressing a run button takes the same permission as running a workflow anywhere else in Lodol. Every app keeps a version history too, and restoring an earlier version adds it as a new one, so even a restore can be undone.
For people outside your workspace, owners and admins can publish a read-only link that shows an app's stored values, live, without signing in, and make it private again at any time.
What teams build
- A pipeline board that shows this week's new leads and where each one stands, with a button that runs your lead research.
- A finance screen with this month's revenue, invoices outstanding by customer, and a button that sends the Monday report early.
- A request form that hands a teammate's request straight to the workflow that handles it, with a notes timeline of what happened next.
Give your workflows a front door.
On the Workflows page, choose Create, then New App. Start free if you don't have a workspace yet.
