Improvements to expand and edit records

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:

@Jordan_Scott1 Just a quick heads up that the link you posted seems to have permissions set to limit it only to those with a certain email.

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.

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:

Thank you for providing a formal method for people to provide additional feedback. Thank you also for the clear deadine. That deadline also means that many of us will be hoping to hear an update immediately following the deadline. I understand that we cannot expect to see actual changes as soon as the deadline passes, however, some sort of update would be nice.

I hope that you also take into account all of the feedback and suggestions previously provided in this thread. Some people took a lot of effort to provide their feedback, and some of them may not frequent this forum enough to see your update. These people’s inputs should be taken into account, even if they do not fill out the form.

I also prefer if feedback and suggestions are made on the open forum. This lets other people read and react to those suggestions. Sometimes the best suggestions come to mind when processing different ideas from other people.

I know that it would be much easier for Airtable to evaluate information provided in a tidy form versus reading through a long forum thread. However, I think there are benefits of keeping the suggestions in this thread. Plus, the wording for the form smacks slightly of Airtable asking the users to design for free what Airtable’s employees are being paid to do.

I have seen Airtable’s designers come up with beautiful designs after dealing with an uproar of complaints on these forums. I firmly believe that they can do it again. (It would be even nicer if it could happen without the uproar of complaints to begin with.)

Personally, I think it’s disrespectful of Airtable to now require everybody to go through a form to submit the exact same opinions that they have already expressed in this thread.

Many people took a lot of time to submit their opinions here, plus many of these people might no longer be following this thread to even know about the form’s existence.

A form also hides community critiques of Airtable by shifting discussions from public to private.

Furthermore, the very first question on the form starts off on an extremely disappointing note, because it indicates that Airtable doesn’t even understand what the big deal is. The questions are coming from a place of confusion, as if Airtable is confused by the community feedback.

This is what the big deal is: the expanded view was usable before, and now it is bordering on unusable. People have outlined their thoughts clearly in this thread.

And to think that all of this could have been avoided by just giving people the option to opt in or opt out of this experimental new feature, and collecting feedback along the way from the people who opted in.

@ScottWorld This is meant to be the opposite of disrespectful, and I hope you know that my intention is to do everything I can to make sure the community can be part of the solution here. The goal is not to hide any critiques, but rather to compile solutions to those critiques in one location so that our team is able to move as quickly as possible. I personally made sure that every single comment in this thread has been documented and escalated, so there is no need to resubmit anything already shared, but rather if you want to share a solution/proposed change based on the feedback that was shared by yourself or another user, you now have another avenue to do so. The team knows that there are a variety of pain points users are running into, so the goal of sharing the problem you’re trying to solve as well as a solution allows people to contribute to any part of this conversation and be as inclusive as possible in the process.

Personally, I think it’s disrespectful of Airtable to now require everybody to go through a form to submit the exact same opinions that they have already expressed in this thread.

Many people took a lot of time to submit their opinions here, plus many of these people might no longer be following this thread to even know about the form’s existence.

A form also hides community critiques of Airtable by shifting discussions from public to private.

Furthermore, the very first question on the form starts off on an extremely disappointing note, because it indicates that Airtable doesn’t even understand what the big deal is. The questions are coming from a place of confusion, as if Airtable is confused by the community feedback.

This is what the big deal is: the expanded view was usable before, and now it is bordering on unusable. People have outlined their thoughts clearly in this thread.

And to think that all of this could have been avoided by just giving people the option to opt in or opt out of this experimental new feature, and collecting feedback along the way from the people who opted in.

I think that it is clear that Airtable didn’t understand how people used expanded views when they created their re-design.

I’m going out a limb here, but I think that first question form is looking for the tasks that people want to accomplish with the expanded view. Are you trying to do data entry for multiple fields? Data entry for select fields? Do you need a “dashboard” like view of the record primarily for seeing data without doing any data entry. Are you doing a lot of copy/paste in the expanded view? Do you only use the expanded view when looking at the record history? Do different people in the organization use expanded view in different ways? Do you tend to page through records one after the other to find a particular record or to visually compare records? Do you need to see large attachments and the full text of long text fields, or do you find yourself endlessly scrolling to find the field you need, and wish there were a way to collapse the fields? Do you design your views so that you only ever need to look at the first “screen” of fields? When scanning the fields, what type of meta-information do you need to know? Do you really need to know the exact field type, or do you just need to know if the field is editable? Do you differentiate groups of fields by use emoji in your field names, and is the color of that emoji important to how you use the expanded view?

I am NOT a fan of this change. The expanded view is now all white without a distinction or separation between fields. Please add the boxes or some color to this view.

Icons are a must! Please add them back.
Editable field MUST have a contrasting color. No border or contrast just give me a LONG list of items and text.
Please delete the instructions telling me to start typing. This is confusing to those who do not edit records.
In most cases, I have more than 10 document attached to a record. Now, I must scroll even more to get to the information I want in the expanded view. Please make the attached documents section small again. If I want to view a document, I can expand that section.

All in all, I am NOT a fan of the changes.

I think that it is clear that Airtable didn’t understand how people used expanded views when they created their re-design.

I’m going out a limb here, but I think that first question form is looking for the tasks that people want to accomplish with the expanded view. Are you trying to do data entry for multiple fields? Data entry for select fields? Do you need a “dashboard” like view of the record primarily for seeing data without doing any data entry. Are you doing a lot of copy/paste in the expanded view? Do you only use the expanded view when looking at the record history? Do different people in the organization use expanded view in different ways? Do you tend to page through records one after the other to find a particular record or to visually compare records? Do you need to see large attachments and the full text of long text fields, or do you find yourself endlessly scrolling to find the field you need, and wish there were a way to collapse the fields? Do you design your views so that you only ever need to look at the first “screen” of fields? When scanning the fields, what type of meta-information do you need to know? Do you really need to know the exact field type, or do you just need to know if the field is editable? Do you differentiate groups of fields by use emoji in your field names, and is the color of that emoji important to how you use the expanded view?

This is a great laundry list of considerations for any detailed record view. Unfortunately, it is woefully incomplete - there are dozens of questions if you truly want to create “the perfect” expanded view. And by “perfect” I mean never ideal. :winking_face:

All of this is and much more is avoidable.

I’m surprised that no one has suggested that the expended view of any given record support the optional ability to render the information as a user-definable interface.

Ultimately, Airtable will do this because no single expanded view will ever satisfy every user or every use case. The current approach - a hardened, fixed design - is unsustainable.

All of this could have been entirely avoided by simply creating an optional Interface pallette. With this approach, the classic view would be there for all the comfort-seekers and the sky would be the limit for all others who had any trepidation concerning the classic view.

It is also an imaginary laundry list. It is just my guess on the type of feedback that Jordan was hoping to get. There will never be an “expanded view” that will completely please everyone. Airtable is probably looking for a solution that they think will fit 90% of the use cases. Woe to anyone who happens to fall into that other 10%.

Serious question: Can we please just revert it back to how it used to be?

What I find interesting is that nobody ever complained about the old view, but Airtable insisted on changing it.

Meanwhile, people have been complaining about hundreds of other things regularly, yet Airtable steadfastly refuses to change actual pain points for people.

The logic at this company completely baffles me.

Another recent change they made a few months ago which is terrible:

I hate that when you hover over the view name in the toolbar, a completely useless & irrelevant tooltip pops up which completely blocks the list of views, which is precisely what you were trying to see by hovering over the view name in the toolbar. :man_shrugging: :man_facepalming:

I often find myself wondering: Do Airtable employees actually use Airtable?

Actually, there are some users who have indicated their complaints with the old interface were included in the new vastly hated version. So there were reasons for Airtable to entertain changes.

I agree. The old design had many faults (from my perspective) including but not limited to the following:

1. The inefficient use of space for “narrow” fields (like dates)
2. It follows the field visibility/sort order of the first view in the table, with no way to customize this behavior for different scenarios
3. Linked record fields take up a massive amount of space if there are 5+ links (I mentioned this above)

all of the above were carried through to the new design.

I’m surprised that no one has suggested that the expended view of any given record support the optional ability to render the information as a user-definable interface.

Ultimately, Airtable will do this because no single expanded view will ever satisfy every user or every use case. The current approach - a hardened, fixed design - is unsustainable.

All of this could have been entirely avoided by simply creating an optional Interface pallette. With this approach, the classic view would be there for all the comfort-seekers and the sky would be the limit for all others who had any trepidation concerning the classic view.

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:

yes! it seems if we can view the pill shape from the grid view in interfaces we should be able to view there as well.
On the inverse, attachments are too small for me (using documents) to see any of the words on the page in ALL the views

Glad to see you are listening,

The main issue that is emerging ever more clearly for us is that this new interface is discriminating against our collaborators who suffer from Dyslexia. We have three of these.

Everyone is finding it hard to find the fields they want to look at. Our dyslexia sufferers are really struggling and may not be able to continue to use Airtable. The loss of boxes and colour clues round fields has left them feeling they are swimming in a sea of text.

Please restore this aspect, i.e. colour/shading to show background v fields, and a line round the fields. A grey line that turns blue when clicked in was ideal.

For what it’s worth, the full linked record view is very useful for our team. I think it makes sense for the pill to exist in the grid – It’s logical for the expanded view to be… expanded… and show more!