Improvements to expand and edit records

This thread started with some excitement and the promise of a better product but has sadly acted as a lightning rod for dissatisfaction and there’s no end in sight.

In the feedback data thus far I have gleaned… (~ means approx BTW)

• ~21% appear to believe there are some positive aspects to this change.
• ~87% appear to hate the change.
• ~60% appear to hate this change for more than one reason.
• ~25% believe this change was a significant step backwards.
• ~52% have provided some helpful alternative approaches and augmentations.
• ~36% are prepared to become former customers because of this change.

And all of this unhappiness, customer dissatisfaction, and business-dependent disruption could have been entirely avoided while also gathering this data and much more.

I’ve worked in the software industry my entire life — ever since I was 12 years old — and I have never experienced a company that acts like this.

When I was 12, all I had to play with was a stick. The term “software” wouldn’t have been invented for another 8 years. :winking_face:

I have; you’ve been lucky. In the grand scheme of the software industry mistakes like this are pretty common. In the march from adolescence to mature technologies, the ones that are hyper-successful typically advance their platforms rapidly by recognizing that the product is the survey - no forms, no feedback discussions; just user analytics where customers vote with behaviors.

Airtable is a very modern UX company that has not apparently realized the power of subliminal real-time analytics.

When was the last time Apple had to broadcast an email about an iOS change or faced this kind of community backlash? :thinking_face: The product is the survey. It requires no forms or excessive and complicated human conversations - just a little exercising by users and behind the scenes the data collected should make it really obvious where the developers need to spend a little more time.

Any word from Dev on all the negative comments here? Any hope of us returning to something that is easier to view or to fix the glitches outlined?

Does anyone know how to take issues up the line at Airtable? Is anyone who is unhappy an Enterprise User? Or, well known at Airtable? Who is their head of development? I really want a reversal and quick.

Here are the main methods of providing feedback on this issue:

• Post to this thread. It is being read by Airtable, even if you do not see many posts by them. (Not all threads are read by Airtable, but ones like this are.)
• Contact support.
• If you have an enterprise account, talk with your account manager.

So do many other users. However, Airtable has historically decided on their own timetable on making changes. Some changes that are clearly bugs get resolved very quickly. Other changes take weeks to redesign and implement. Yet other issues have never been addressed. I suspect that Airtable’s UX/UI designers are already back at the drawing board for this particular issue, but we may not know when/if there will be changes until Airtable releases them.

Historically, Airtable has not valued customer feedback, which has been the most frustrating part for me about using Airtable.

As @kuovonne mentioned above, we only have 3 options: (1) this one thread that we’re posting in now, (2) enterprise users can contact their account manager, or (3) contacting support.

To contact support, you can send an email to support@airtable.com.

Yah, I’ve reached out to support just now to show my support for user feedback and testing of such enhancements. I’m hoping they’ll be revisiting this due to the amount of community feedback within this thread alone.

Came here looking for this, was pretty upset to see what was a pretty decent layout turn into something that just looks… off. I agree with all the other complaints. The main thing for me is the off-center fields, I can see this working for most types, but for long text, where you have multiple lines of text, you end up with a massive empty space on the left, and it being aligned to the right like that just looks wrong.

Also, there’s too much white space in general, which is what makes it not work that well for even the other field types. It looks about 3x wider on average than it needs to be. Even for the longer label names it’s still more than twice as wide as it needs to be. At least make it dynamic, so that the space is adjusted based on the longest field.

Attachments also look really weird with the massive white space to the left. Maybe make some of the fields centered?

The other thing is how it all blends together… which is probably why it looks so bad. Adding a ton of white space while at the same time removing the borders and moving the labels to the left so that it all blends together, it makes it much harder on the eyes. Also is the label text smaller too? It’s like all the decisions were made with the goal of making it as hard as possible to look at.

An ideal solution would be to restore the borders or add some other form of separation (the borders could maybe stay gone if the labels were above the fields (and were larger/bold again), since those can act as separators), and then allow users to choose if they want labels to appear to the side or above, and have dynamic spacing if they’re positioned to the left.

I get it, there’s always going to be people who dislike any UI changes. I’m pretty sure there’s been changes in the past I thought were bad, but I could live with it, however this one I dislike so much that I feel compelled to post here. Not that I expect anything to change, if pretty much every other software company is anything to go by when it comes to abrupt UI changes that no one asked for, it’ll either stay the same or get worse, but… worth a shot.

I seem to be back to the old interface, for that I thank you. Not sure if this is across the board or I’m finally on a cool list lol.

Wow, you’re lucky! They reverted you back? I’m still on the new monstrosity. I want to know how I can get on the cool list!

WHAAAA?! Mac app on right, microsoft edge on left

Phased rollout/rollback. Thanks for the photo of the side-by-side comparison.

Side by side, it’s so incredibly obvious which one is usable and which one is unusable.

Hi Jordan, whilst the label being on the left is not a problem, the space between the label and the field is. It may have saved vertical space but makes it much less user friendly trying to see which field you’re entering data into whilst record is expanded.

I got all excited then - but no - both MS Edge and Chrome giving me new horrible version

I have also requested Support to reverse the changes. I got this reply :slightly_smiling_face:
Hi Margaret,

Juliana here from Support ️

Thanks for reaching out about this. While it is not possible to revert to a past version at this time, can you let me know if there are any specific fields that are confusing to you or less efficient to your workflow? I will gladly pass this feedback directly to my team.

We make these changes based on comments from users, like you, in research sessions. Taking these comments into account, we slowly roll out these changes while closely monitoring any feedback. We understand that these changes may not improve every workflow, which is why we appreciate your opinion so much.

Best,
Juliana

I will detail all the things I dislike the most - I suggest others contact support too.

Margaret

Wait, so it IS being rolled back? Or do you just mean that maybe the rollout hasn’t hit the Mac app yet?

@Jordan_Scott1, any updates?

Like most have expressed on this thread, I’m really hoping that either this change will be reversed or that we will be given the option to choose between this new view and the old “classic” view. Even if we can’t go back, there are obviously adjustments (detailed in this thread) that need to be made in order to improve the functionality of this new view.

If there’s even a rough timeline for when we might see any of those things happen, it would be really helpful to be able to share that with our users who are struggling so much right now so they don’t lose hope. :confused:

Communication is key! Airtable, please don’t continue making the classic mistake of saying nothing just because you can’t say everything. Staying silent just because you haven’t quite figured out the solution yet is NOT helpful. Even acknowledging that a problem exists and that you’re working on it goes a long way in building good will with your customers. If you hear us, let us know!

I’ve had the new version in my Mac app for a few days. My gut says that the Mac app in the screenshot might not have been refreshed in a while, so it’s still showing the old version. Can you confirm @Rebecca_Elam ?

I think your gut is very perceptive. Almost certainly the case with a cached app view. If there had been any attempt to roll-back, (a) @Jordan_Scott1 probably would have updated this thread and (b) more than @Rebecca_Elam would have seen something change.

It could be either one. I don’t know. I agree with you that more communication from Airtable would be most welcome.

Or, likely - it’s the third either. :slightly_smiling_face: Nothing has changed.

I got a copy-paste of this same formula email. Not feeling very hopeful we are getting anywhere.

@Jordan_Scott1 - Thank you for sharing the work that was done, and for working on issues that folks have requested. While I agree with the users above who have pointed out issues with the new UI, and that some simple shading, icons and ease-of-use/ease-of-reading are critical improvements (and yea, would be nice if we didn’t have to live through this evolution in real time) - I DO REALLY APPRECIATE the extra space. I wrote a post on it here and submitted support ticket requesting same a while ago - there is so much real estate on the screen not being used by the record view, and a step in that direction, even if not loved by folks, is still at its base a step in a direction that I and likely others have suggested.

I compared screen shots of the last version from that post above with current - showing the gain in field size. I’d LOVE to be able to expand more/control record view with, but for this specific category, I think its a gain. I really hope the UI stuff that is the theme of these responses above does catch up very soon. I too have been apologizing to team members and new users saying ‘I’m sure this will improve soon, but hey, we have more space!’.

Hi all -

Thank you for all the thoughtful feedback you have shared, it’s very much appreciated. Our hope is that these changes improve your Airtable experience, and we’re actively looking into solutions with your feedback in mind. If you have any solutions you’d like to propose to the team for consideration as we kick off this process, we’d love to have you submit them here. This form will be open for submissions until February 15, 2022.

UPDATE: If you have previously submitted feedback via this discussion, there is no need to resubmit via the form. Rather, if you have proposed solutions to any of the pain points that have been outlined that you think could help the team in their evaluation of this feedback, we would love to hear from you.

I also did want to clarify, these updates were not rolled back over the weekend. We looked into this today and if you haven’t refreshed or closed your browser the old experience will still appear—sorry for any confusion that may have caused.

Again, thank you for taking the time to not only share your feedback with us but for brainstorming potential solutions with us as well. Personally, I can’t wait to see what’s next for expanded record view :slightly_smiling_face: