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

@mprokop make sure you file a bug report.

FWIW I received a response from the support team today that bringing two-way sync to non-enterprise accounts is in the works. No timeline was given.

The CS person said it was still only in beta testing for enterprise though which makes me think that the CS, marketing, and product teams are somehow not on the same page…

The new interface features completely backtracks why I built them separately for each member on our team, so they wouldn't see information not relevant to them, have a non-distracting space that was easy to change between. The new sidebar on the interface is horrible and I have lost so much valuable time on what I've built. Airtable can you please give the option to revert for users?

Hi @Stephanie_Sosa , when will the editable two-way sync be available to non-enterprise plans? We， SMB， greatly need this！ 

Has Airtable done any surveying of their user base? We're not all Product and Marketing teams creating web software or marketing campaigns. Our company makes custom physical products that have to get build and installed in the real world. I know from these forums that many of the small & medium companies using Airtable are also manufacturing and construction businesses.

Our firm specifically chose to use Airtable instead of the MANY other project management software solutions available specifically because those other solutions are built specifically for digital product/content companies. Airtable allows us to link the manufacturing data we need to our overall workflows. To read that the new, TERRIBLE, left sidebar for Interfaces was introduced for the ease of the Airtable team in creating its own "Apps by Airtable" platform is incredibly frustrating because, guess what? Those "Apps by Airtable" are for Product and Marketing teams. Just like every other platform that's already out there. Meanwhile, this Interface change has tanked the usability of many of the interfaces I've created for our team. 

This Enterprise customer is on Airtable because we need to build our OWN apps for our specific use case. We need Airtable to provide the many feature/bug fix requests from the community dealing with improvements to the core functionality, not reduce functionality for us to better serve a different slice of their market. In the meantime, we'll be looking for an alternative platform. 

I just noticed that with the new Interface navigation, the icon in my browser tab is the same regardless of which Interface I'm in, or if I'm in the underlying base.  I suppose this is trivial feature, but as a Creator building and supporting interfaces for multiple teams, having that icon and color coding was really useful as I move between interfaces.

@Liz_Shaw Thank you for pointing that out, for some reason I hadn't picked up on that move backwards.

At the moment I have 10 tabs open related to airtable, and the different colors and icons used to be very helpful.  What's the point in picking a seperate icon and color for an interface if the icon for the underlying base is the only one that gets used?

Agree that the removal of different colors for interfaces is another confusing regression. It’s also mismatched with what shows on the Airtable home screen. Guessing this will get resolved in a future update but seems like another sign that this feature was rushed to market half baked…

I am a creator and since the new sidebar interface feature, I cannot change the colour of interfaces. Apart from not liking the sidebar feature and its lack of collapsibility, I need to be able to change the colours of each interface, that is the point of having them separate, otherwise you are just turning it into pages and subpages as if it is all one big interface!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am so pleased that so many dozens of people have chimed into this thread to voice their complaints about the damage that Airtable has done to the product with this very rushed and very poorly thought-out update.

It is also eye-opening for everyone to see the lack of response from Airtable employees as well, because now everybody is getting their own personal experience with the uphill battle that Airtable customers & consultants have been fighting against for almost a decade now. 

I think everybody can see very clearly now that Airtable does not seem to care about the needs of their customers, nor do they seem to listen to their customers.

Just roll the **bleep** release back and apologize.

You'll instantly make everyone an ally.

Tomorrow is the day! I’m not looking forward to all the complaints in the morning… I love Airtable but tomorrow isn’t going to be fun.

Please allow us to revert the left side bar changes. Makes everything look horrible and unusable. Not sure why Airtable provides updates and forces you to change your design, just add features and allow the community to verify if it is helpful or not...  

A perfect solution would be to allow the left-side navigation bar to expand when hovered over the icon on the left and collapse when not in use to prevent a static version that is stuck on everyone screens. Especially since this bar is interacted with probably less than 5% of the time.. does not warrant this much space on the UI. 

The interface sidebar is an absolute deficit to most of my interface designs. There must be a way to collapse or get rid of it completely. It is a huge step backwards, and takes precious real estate away from the tool we really want to use. Please make this go away

Tons and tons of people on my team complaining about the left side navigation now that it's rolled out to all. Really cannot believe you saw all these complaints and still decided to deploy it widely.

I mean, some people put a lot thought and effort into their layouts and this update basically says "haha screw your careful work." I figured for sure they'd have an option to collapse it by today but no. I CAN adjust the width of the sidebar slightly.... not really sure what the point of that is other than to tease.

Welcome to the world of Airtable. Here’s the most obnoxious thing of all: The Airtable consultants begged Airtable ahead of time to NOT roll this out in its current form, but they let us know in no uncertain terms that they weren’t interested in our feedback. This is how it's ALWAYS been with Airtable... things will never change until they get a new CEO. These sorts of systemic problems at a company always stem from the top down.

I mean, the interface designer is literally a 'page layout' program. Imagine Adobe chopping off 2 inches from everyone's existing InDesign documents and mashing the content into the remaining space. Designers would break their wacom tablets in two and send the pieces to Adobe. Clearly Airtable doesn't take this as seriously, not coming from the desktop publishing world.

Personally, I'm not hugely affected by this but the execution has me eyeing self-hosted solutions a bit more closely. I mean, that's the thing with cloud services -- it's not enough to have a good product, the company managing the product has to be responsible.

I reckon some people who are 'in deep' with deployed applications are resorting to browser extensions to get rid of the sidebar... but that's inviting future problems and may be a non-starter on locked-down corporate systems.

Anyway, I'm sure none of this is news. I feel really badly for people with tight layouts that are now even tighter. I'll feel even worse for people who are scambling to adjust them if/when Airtable releases a collapse function. Has anything been said about that?

Our team has found a fun new issue with the left navigation panel: You can no longer "open in new tab" if you want to open another interface page without closing the one you're in. You could do this with the top nav bar......

Our client is angry this morning.

Our client's staff is angry this morning.

Not acceptable; this turns Airtable from a solution set, to a toy for prototyping. Absolutely no resiliency in the field where work stoppage or asset extinction is a constant liability.

"Now what?"

1. We will see what Airtable support has to say in direct email, which so far is responsive and we've gotten a person on the other end to deal with.
2. We can't help but now prioritize the examination of alternative solution sets, and that is not a shock to anyone reading it. Stumbles are like that.

Get up and walk, Airtable. You have clients.

Another trivial but irritating effect of the new left sidebar navigation - different types of interface pages display the Interface title and page name differently at the top. Looks like pages created from the Grid/List/Calendar templates nicely display the Interface Title/Page name at the top, but Forms, Record Review, Summary, and blank/custom pages show nothing. 

In addition to being annoying from a design perspective, this (combined with the removal of the ability to color-code individual interfaces) is slowing down my workflow as I have to constantly double-check which interface I'm in on a given tab if I'm working on a page type that doesn't show the title up top. (I know the title is slightly bolded in the left sidebar, but it's subtle and my focus is on the main part of the page where my data is.)

Airtable is riddled with these little inconsistencies where features behave one way in one scenario, and differently in another. (For example, having 3 different sets of available button actions depending on whether I'm on an Interface page built from a template, an interface page built from the blank option, or in the base. Or the list of records displayed in the filter being different on an Interface page built from a template, than an interface page built from the blank option.)  These inconsistencies make rollout within our organization harder if the training has to include statements like "well, if the page you're on looks like this, then use the filter like this to find what you need, but if the page looks like that, you have to do this different thing..."

Further frustrations: There appears to be no way to reorder, group, or hide interfaces in the left sidebar (Again, inconsistency! It behaves completely differently then the "Views" sidebar in a base.) There's no way for an individual to separate the Interfaces they actually use from the rest of the organization's interfaces.

What AI thinks about this slow-motion train wreck... (I used CustomGPT to build this in five minutes)

Percentage of ChatGPT’s analysis above that is correct: 100%

Percentage of Airtable employees that will even read @Bill_French‘s post above: 0%

Everybody, sing along with me:

Airtable 👏 Does 👏 Not 👏 Care 👏

On a call today with a client, I clicked "edit interface" on my 13in surface tablet and we couldn't even work through edits together. The left sidebar is a big misstep.

I will say, what's more concerning to me is that veteran Airtable users and frequent posters to this community are FURIOUS. Obviously, no one is feeling heard here. For some of us, Airtable provides a means to income, so we care about the product. Why are long time users being ignored? Why the lack of meaningful response? We have clients asking questions that Airtable isn't helping us answer. 

Frustrating. And, really, embarrasing.

Looking in retrospect, while Airtable kept its scope within the boundaries of their database features, everything would run quite smoothly.

Once they decided to come out and release a front-end feature that directly effects end-users’ interactions, they end up stumbling this way, even after some successful previous implementations.

UI/UX is a specialty in its own right these days, so I’m perplexed over how these drawbacks could not be considered in advance of such an impactful change.

All this incident reminds me of what I’ve once been warned about in a course on Continuous Improvement and QA — the ‘intoxication of success’ syndrome. Maybe the syndrome struck again.

By the way — IMO this incident got enough reaching and entity as to be added to the incidents monitoring page. So users would have a glimpse of how/when its solution is being addressed.