Introducing new ways to harness the power of AI, build apps, and connect data

I do like the headspace the side nav offers... that feels so much better... I kinda knew that was an issue before, but wow, thank you!

And if it could collapse too, that'd be great. I do notice that it's resizable, so not too bad already.

> First, I want to share bit more context for how we landed on this new design:

@Shannon_Anahata Thank you for coming to post your point of view.

> We have heard from customers that navigating between interfaces was so buried

I can totally believe that you had large enterprise customers providing you with this feedback. However, the problem was that you listened to the issues of a small subset of customers and crafted a solution for them without taking into account the ramifications on everyone else. The left-side-interface-navigation-pane works beautifully for the use case you are describing. But it doesn't work for a lot of other people for all the reasons listed in this thread.

Airtable has a broad and varied user base.  But the impression from the outside is that Airtable listens to a handful of large enterprise customers and builds what those few customers want, without much regard for the impact on everyone else. Sometimes the "little guys" suddenly get updates that break their systems because the changes were designed for a different type of user. Sometimes the little guys just hear about nifty features that they desperately want (increased record limits, two-way sync, etc.) but cannot get because those features are restricted to enterprise.

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> Second, we hear you on pricing and packaging! The good news is that we're actively working on updating our plans to better enable customers to get access to enterprise features...so stay tuned in the coming months for updates 

@Stephanie_Sosa Thank you for letting us know that you are actively working on this. I totally get that it is a thorny issue with deep engineering and financial repercussions. I remember Airtable representatives saying as much at the last DareTable conference over a year ago. As much as I wish that you would run ideas past a focus group of consultants, I also understand that talking with external people about pricing is even harder to do than talking about other features.

Unable to find the option to Toggle "Stop Accepting New Responses" on and off on the new redesigned form share view menu.

@Shannon_Anahata we appreciate the response. I hope you all understand that, despite the overwhelmingly negative feedback in this thread, if the new left nav panel was optional, we would all love it. There are definitely use cases where it is the better choice in an interface design. The fact that it is not optional, and being dropped on us so quickly, turns it into a catastrophe. I want to be very clear that in many use cases (see: mobile), this new nav panel isn't just an annoyance, it makes using Airtable interfaces impossible, with no work-around.

Interface Designer was a gamechanger for Airtable. I think it is possible Airtable is somewhat unaware of just how good their product is and how creative their users are. In my organization's case, the systems we have managed to put in place are drastically better than off-the-shelf subscription solutions that literally cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Please, like many others in this thread, I beg you guys to reconsider the scheduling of this push. Many of us have poured our hearts into our Airtable solutions, and decisions like this can completely blow up what Interface Designer has enabled us to do. The "trust us, it's going to get better" dialog does not appease my immediate concerns.

Interface Designer is amazing but it is best when we can design the interface.

The left navigation for interfaces is a disaster for low vision users. Some users lower their screen resolution below the recommend level for their graphics card and zoom in their browser windows. Our production interface layout accommodates this. The left navigation blew that up completely, rendering our interface unusable for these people. Please expedite the ability to collapse the left navigation.

@Shannon_Anahata thank you for responding here! As a sign of good faith could you try to at least delay the full sidebar rollout until it has been updated to be collapsible?

As a product designer of over 12 years I have seen multiple times how businesses focusing only on their few enterprise customers and forgetting about their many other customers has ruined entire products/businesses. Please don’t be tempted to go down this path. We don’t need another Asana competitor, but we desperately need affordable/usable software solutions for small businesses.

Hi @Shannon_Anahata, thank you fo the post, but I don't think it really addresses the root of the problem that is evident in this thread and festering around the Airtable community.

If the goal is to make it so that anyone can use the apps, then why release this if user feedback might have suggested that it was not properly usable? I think Airtable so often forgets how many types of users they're working with because Airtable, and especially Interfaces, is incredible for connecting the not your average techy employee with powerful data. I was excited for Interfaces so that we could continue to excite our teams with powerful ways to use and edit data in a more user-friendly way because Airtable can be intimidating, especially when we are using it to "connect important business processes and build more powerful applications." I understand that sure, overall improving navigation would be beneficial, but without knowing how navigation should be improved and just that it should be improved, what is the benefit of releasing a product update? Navigation/UI has now taken two step back to be weaker and has frustrated the end users you're speaking about to now not want to use Interfaces.

I have to imagine that the majority of companies and teams that use Airtable are not in the tech world and like many of us, opted for Airtable because it was a great way to connect data with our business operations in a user-friendly way. When systems managers have no idea that are updates are coming and have to scurry to make provisions as to not disrupt day-to-day business, that indicates being very out of touch with how customers/users are using the product. Our teams and clients are not as concerned about roadmaps or updates down the road - they want a tool that helps them get their job efficiently and doesn't want to hear that it "should" be coming soon if the tool is rendered useless for them today.

Here's my recommendation:

1. Delay rollout of the interface to Editors until interface change is optional .

If you can do this and quickly confirm it for everyone, you'll calm 90% of the anxiety and get back enough goodwill from demonstrating you are listening to users.

2. Understand the critical points made in the commentary here.

"You don't know how powerful what you have is."

"You don't understand how people are creatively flocking to this."

3. Harness this moment.

Don't  roll it out to Editors until it's an optional feature. Make sure it's OFF by default and use this as an opportunity to inject some real coherence and competence into your change management process.

Take the opportunity to find out how these smaller clients are using your product because that's where you are going to find the evangelists suddenly in love with the fact you're listening to them.

And they are the ones who are up all night breaking themselves to figure out new applications for their clients, which is the type of innovation concatenation you want.

Although feature-fixing the new Interface sidebar is a step forward - what we're needing here is for Airtable to understand that their system is production (!!!). Users need an opt-in toggle so that they can pace the update at their own time, or otherwise ignore it whilst they focus on their day-to-day work. But enough has been said about this problem, and at least it's getting addressed (even though I still want to access the old UI layout, and not just collapse the new side window!)

What I'm really bugged about, is the new Two Way Sync feature being limited to Enterprise only. It's disrespectful to Pro Subscribers, consultants who propagate Airtable into businesses, who should at least have access to this feature. Even if the feature were limited in scope to a base cap limit, at least give us the means to try it, talk about it with our customers, etc.

Why were pro users rejected from accessing this much anticipated feature?

Hi @Shannon_Anahata,
Thanks for the informative post. It appears you were commissioned to offer your chest to the bullets ‌😐‌

Clients don't need Airtable doing 'damage control', they rather need an effective 'damage prevention'.
Namely, a careful, well-thought rollout methodology, based on extensive feedback from their super-users (top consultants).

[Quote] "this is just the first step and we intend to continue improving the experience. To start with, we are actively working to make the left navigation collapsible."

Why not doing this before rolling out the nav bar?
Some AT team seems not to be aware of the use cases of many medium-small clients.

But let’s be proactive. Now that AT succumbed to the AI wave, here’s an idea:
Use AI to extract and categorise the use cases, for which this very forum makes a rich data source.

So you may get a more accurate picture of the kind of end-users that conform AT clients base, and will avoid painful disruptions on future implementations.

@Shannon_Anahata 

Your response was completely unhelpful to us, because you didn’t actually address our concerns.

Your response actually proves that nothing has changed at Airtable, and that nothing will likely ever change at Airtable.

It’s completely irrelevant that Airtable is going to eventually fix the left sidebar someday in future months when it feels like a convenient time for Airtable to get around to fixing it.

The problem is that we’re in this terrible situation at all. The problem is that Airtable has done this to us 12 times per year for the last 6 years. The problem is that Airtable doesn’t care about its customers. The problem is that Airtable doesn’t communicate with its customers. The problem is that Airtable doesn’t listen to its customers. The problem is that Airtable has zero respect for its customers.

Until Airtable fixes these core underlying problems that make Airtable a highly dysfunctional & completely untrustworthy company, nothing has changed. 

It's really really disapointing that two-way sync is locked behind Enterprise!  We've been waiting for that feature since you announced it this past winter – we have a lot of hacky work-arounds in place that two way sync would help a lot and we can't afford the $10,000 a sales rep told us it would cost to use Enterprise.  It's really bizarre to me that you would make what seems like a game-changing critical feature completely unavailable to small businesses with less than 20 people.  

"we are actively working to make the left navigation collapsible. Please keep your eyes out for that update coming soon."

Thank you @Shannon_Anahata

SEE POST BELOW. (THIS FORUM CAUSED A DUPLICATE POST.)

@Stephanie_Sosa @Shannon_Anahata 

Yet another major screwup from Airtable:

In your efforts to rush out a newly-revamped “Share” button, you removed the toggle on form views to “temporarily stop accepting new responses”.

So if someone needs to temporarily stop accepting new responses, they can no longer do that.

Even worse, if they've already stopped accepting new responses, they can no longer re-enable their form again.

And yet, get this — you have a completely unusable & useless toggle for forms called “Allow Users to Copy Data Out of This View”, which should be for other shared views… not form views. If you try to use this toggle, Airtable crashes.

What this indicates is that nobody at Airtable even realized that different views have different share buttons. 

p.s. Not to mention that all of Airtable’s support articles still reference the old share button which doesn’t exist anymore.

When the missing shared features are restored, can we also please have the other suggested features that were requested by the community during the announcement of these now broken/missing features? There were great ideas in that thread that would be useful. 

Link is here @Stephanie_Sosa , by  - @Sarah_Trisorus 

https://community.airtable.com/t5/announcements/new-feature-ability-to-close-form-submissions/ba-p/97513

While I understand some features are only suitable for, developed for and relevant to enterprise customers, it feels like Airtables recent strategy to cater more to enterprise comes at the cost of their core mission: “to democratize software”.

Keeping features like 2-way sync, AI-features, higher record limits away from non-enterprise, is not so much democratizing but more like serving big players to stay ahead of the little guys by gate-keeping. 

Also, a BIG issue coming up in the comments is that Airtable is not actively engaging with the demos/community - except for those big enterprise clients of course.

Is Airtable increasingly serving a corporatocracy instead of democracy?
Makes me wonder, is Airtable still true to it’s mission then 🤔 🤔?

The frustration that has been mounting for so long now in the non-enterprise community is at a boiling-point it seems.

So @Stephanie_Sosa @Shannon_Anahata, very curious how this pricing of add-ons will turn out.
Flexible pricing according to usage so that it actually democratizes all the capabilities of Airtable, or is Airtable keeping these pricing gaps in place - even with these addons - so that it effectively gate-keeps important and useful features for all….

Edit: This has been fixed since I posted. Leaving my comment and replies up.

Not only do I hate the left side navigation bar, it has actually broken some of your functionality. I can no longer delete this nested filter group I was trying to do something with because the trash icon extends past the edge of the window. The black bar on the right is my Start menu bar -- I only mention it to show that's the edge of the browser window. Airtable desktop app has the same problem. 

@mprokop  Maybe you already tried it: Mark the checkbox to hide the bar, in the Properties of the Start menu bar.

@Grunty no, it's literally past the edge of the browser window. doesn't matter where the Start menu is. i just mentioned that was my Start menu so people wouldn't wonder what the black bar was. I could make the browser window as wide as all three of my monitors and I won't be able to touch the trash button. I even opened up the interface editor in the Airtable desktop app and I still can't get to that button.

@mprokop- hover your mouse cursor up the top of the interface - then hold control and scroll the mouse wheel back/forth to zoom the page out. This will hopefully allow you to access the button that's being cut-off by the side of your screen.

@Karlstens nope, it's completely off the page. Resized it to 10%, resized it to 200%, completely outside the edge of the window. 

I still haven't seen Airtable specifically engage here with anything concrete.

Hi, about cleaned up the share view menu 

when seeing form view 
The "stop accepting new response" setting is basic need for a form 

please take it back , thank you!