Improvements to expand and edit records

Just a reminder of how usable the old Airtable used to be:

I’ve been working on a custom CSS stylesheet to allow easy customization of the expanded record view (plus a couple of other tweaks), but works “out of the box” to restore the original layout (based on my admittedly hazy recollection). It was shared earlier to this thread, but it was a very quick slap-dash job and I’ve since had a couple of weeks to make it a bit less janky. Note that this is nonetheless a band-aid solution that can break at any time (the underlying code and HTML structure change quite often).

Installation instructions and additional examples can be found at the linked post.

I’ve given my feedback through the form, but I wrote the stylesheet (and am sharing it with the forum) because, having used Airtable for a few years now, I know that we’re not likely to see the old design again.

I’d like to see the Interfaces designer reused for the next iteration of the expanded record view. Working with records would be much easier if the spatial layout of fields were consistent.

I feel something which would help a lot of people is for Airtable NOT to sipulate this type of thing. Rather allow custom CSS to be applied. I absolutley hate some of the UI elements because they are confusing to some people. For examples in the Form view the first thing you see are the “hidden” fields NOT in the view. Excuse me? Then there is a ton of white space around fields and they are stackerd vertical. We all have monitors which are wider than tall. I want to be able to have them more horizontal or multicolumn so more fields appear on the screen.

Others may hate this, but allow folks to customize CSS would allow us to make what works for us.

Hi everyone,

I hope you all have had a great week so far. I’m excited to share a preview of some updates you’ll see in the coming weeks to the expand and edit record experience.

As some of you may recall, we launched some updates earlier in the year with the goal of making it easier and more intuitive for you to read and edit records. Unfortunately, we fell short on that goal and recognized we could do better. Thanks to everyone’s feedback in this community, we were able to take this as a learning opportunity and make updates with your feedback in mind.

Here are some of the top themes that emerged from the feedback we received:

• Better visual cues are important for quickly distinguishing field types, understanding what’s editable, and improving overall usability.
• Clearer distinction between which fields are editable play a large role in reducing confusion and saving time.
• Cleaner design elements provide clarity and make it easier to quickly scan content.

With all that in mind, here are some of the immediate updates we’ll begin launching next week:

• The return of field icons and input borders
• Clearer disabled / read-only states
• Removed placeholder text
• Other miscellaneous visual polish

There is still a lot for us to do and our team is committed to continuously improving this experience. Our hope continues to be that any changes we roll out will improve your overall Airtable experience and we could not do that without you. Thank you again for being a part of the community and we look forward to building better experiences together.

@Rotimi_Iziduh Thank you very much for this update on the continued improvements to the user interface. I look forward to seeing the new changes as they are rolled out.

Are you interested in feedback on these upcoming changes to the expanded record view? If so, how should users communicate that information? Should we continue to use the form that Jordan indicated in post #76? (The form seems to still be active today, although it is well past the stated deadline for the form closing.) Should we continue comments in this thread? (I’m hoping that the feedback will be positive!)

You probably joined the forums expressly to post this announcement. We always welcome posts from Airtable employees. Would you care to introduce yourself and let us know your involvement in this update? (e.g. are you are developer, ux/ui designer, a part of a communications team, etc.?)

Thank god, amen, and hallelujah! :blush: :pray: :pray: :pray:

This is great news!

Well, @ScottWorld, did Christmas come early!!!?? :grinning:

Mary

@M_k Lol, not really. I wouldn’t call it Christmas if you stole my bicycle and then gave me most of my bicycle back.

How about if it was now a bicycle with miscellaneous visual polish?

I would also like to take the opportunity to give this a +1 and welcome @Rotimi_Iziduh to the community!

Some fixes went in today.

I wish that the input borders (gray boxes) were not visible in shared views, like how it was before this latest change.

Shared views looked much better without the input borders, and the input borders serve no purpose as the user cannot edit the fields anyways. In fact, it can be somewhat confusing to the end user to be presented with something looks like an interactive element, but isn’t.

Edit: To be clear, I am referring to shared views only (the ones you access via a shared view link), not the user-editable views that you get when you log into a base.

This is great feedback.

I can only imagine the Airtable Dev reading this message “But, but, you said to put them back!!” Haha. This is the back and forth that can drive us all nuts, but is SO GOOD. Thank you @Katerie and thank you Airtable Devs!!

I think it is an improvement. Thanks