Oh, wow! So they’ve actively made this decision even worse. :man_facepalming:

Thanks for pointing that out — that explains how I missed it earlier.

I am just infuriated.

Hi @ScottWorld

I would strongly suggest that you send Airtable an email about this most insane latest change.

It seems instead of making things better, they made things worse.

Mary

Yeah, I sent Airtable Support an email earlier today about the first batch of these changes, and just now sent them a 2nd email about this 3rd change.

I even outlined my first 2 reasons in the email to the support team, and as expected from Airtable Support, the guy wrote me back and said this:

Would you be willing to share specific use cases of how this hasn’t worked for you so that I can give the reasoning to the product team? If you have any suggestions of what you would like to see in regards to field creation and editing, let me know.

After I had already told him the first 2 reasons above, he wants to know specific use cases?? And he wants a suggestion of what I would like to see in field creation & editing?? Yeah, how about LEAVE IT ALONE since it was working 100% perfectly fine before.

To recap the 3 issues from above in one convenient list:

1. 
   

   First of all, now we can’t edit fields on mobile web browsers anymore, so now we’re required to use a desktop computer to make any changes to our fields. I would love for Airtable to please explain to me how this has made our lives easier. (Or maybe explain why mobile browsers have been shunned altogether in the product.)

   
   


2. 
   

   Second of all, it makes absolutely no sense for the customization/creation of fields to be separated from the renaming of the fields. It was completely easy & straightforward before, and now they’ve made this a 2-step process that is unintuitive & ridiculous, especially for new users. I would love for Airtable to please explain to me how this made our lives easier.

   
   


3. 
   

   Now when you create a new field, are you ready for this? Sit down for this one. The ABSOLUTE GENIUSES at Airtable have decided that we don’t need to see any of the options for the fields that we create. Whenever you create a new field, it doesn’t show you any of the options for that field. It literally just creates the field. So if you want to make ANY changes to the field options at all (even as simple as adding the “time” to a date field, or changing the options for a “last modified time” field, or ANY OPTIONS AT ALL ), you have to create the field once, then you have to GO BACK INTO THE CUSTOMIZE FIELD OPTION AGAIN to find the options and change the options. Oh, and then, you have to take a 3rd action to RENAME THE FIELD . So now, creating a field & choosing its options now takes 3 DISTINCT STEPS that are extremely confusing for the user (especially if the user doesn’t even know that there are options available): 1) create the field, 2) rename the field, 3) go back into the field customization and choose its options. What ever happened to keeping things easy & understandable & simple & straightforward for the user?

   
   

Think about the insanity of just decision #3 alone. Now, new users aren’t even shown that there are field options for the different fields they’re creating. This makes the product infinitely more difficult & frustrating to use.

@Stephen_Suen @Alex.Wolfe @VictoriaPlummer @Halley_Johnson @somehats @Pooja_Raman @Shrey_Banga @Taylor_Savage @Adam_Minich

I respect that’s your position but I for one will keep asking for the “don’t create the new field until the options have been set” change since that was a point of frustration for me and a change that had merit.

Everything else of the original workflow, in my view, should remain.

I’m not sure I understand? In the past, when you created a new field, everything was on one unified screen: (1) the field name, (2) the field type, and (3) the field options. Now, this one easy-to-use screen has been separated into 3 steps, 2 of which are now hidden from the user.

Ohhhhh, wait — I think you’re talking about if you CANCEL out of creating a field, then the field shouldn’t be created at all. Is that what you’re saying? Yes, that makes perfect 100% sense and totally agree with you 100% on that. That is the only good change that has come out of this fiasco. I totally & completely agree with this.

Yeah, I sent Airtable Support an email earlier today about the first batch of these changes, and just now sent them a 2nd email about this 3rd change.

I even outlined my first 2 reasons in the email to the support team, and as expected from Airtable Support, the guy wrote me back and said this:

Would you be willing to share specific use cases of how this hasn’t worked for you so that I can give the reasoning to the product team? If you have any suggestions of what you would like to see in regards to field creation and editing, let me know.

After I had already told him the first 2 reasons above, he wants to know specific use cases?? And he wants a suggestion of what I would like to see in field creation & editing?? Yeah, how about LEAVE IT ALONE since it was working 100% perfectly fine before.

To recap the 3 issues from above in one convenient list:

1. 
   

   First of all, now we can’t edit fields on mobile web browsers anymore, so now we’re required to use a desktop computer to make any changes to our fields. I would love for Airtable to please explain to me how this has made our lives easier. (Or maybe explain why mobile browsers have been shunned altogether in the product.)

   
   


2. 
   

   Second of all, it makes absolutely no sense for the customization/creation of fields to be separated from the renaming of the fields. It was completely easy & straightforward before, and now they’ve made this a 2-step process that is unintuitive & ridiculous, especially for new users. I would love for Airtable to please explain to me how this made our lives easier.

   
   


3. 
   

   Now when you create a new field, are you ready for this? Sit down for this one. The ABSOLUTE GENIUSES at Airtable have decided that we don’t need to see any of the options for the fields that we create. Whenever you create a new field, it doesn’t show you any of the options for that field. It literally just creates the field. So if you want to make ANY changes to the field options at all (even as simple as adding the “time” to a date field, or changing the options for a “last modified time” field, or ANY OPTIONS AT ALL ), you have to create the field once, then you have to GO BACK INTO THE CUSTOMIZE FIELD OPTION AGAIN to find the options and change the options. Oh, and then, you have to take a 3rd action to RENAME THE FIELD . So now, creating a field & choosing its options now takes 3 DISTINCT STEPS that are extremely confusing for the user (especially if the user doesn’t even know that there are options available): 1) create the field, 2) rename the field, 3) go back into the field customization and choose its options. What ever happened to keeping things easy & understandable & simple & straightforward for the user?

   
   

Think about the insanity of just decision #3 alone. Now, new users aren’t even shown that there are field options for the different fields they’re creating. This makes the product infinitely more difficult & frustrating to use.

@Stephen_Suen @Alex.Wolfe @VictoriaPlummer @Halley_Johnson @somehats @Pooja_Raman @Shrey_Banga @Taylor_Savage @Adam_Minich

I feel like Airtable is writing the playbook on how to turn their biggest Airtable evangelist into their biggest Airtable cynic, skeptic, and doubter. I haven’t been this angry in a long time.

To sum up what’s happened here:

1. 
   

   The Airtable engineering team took a process which was easy-to-understand for all users (both newbies & advanced users), and which only took one simple step to accomplish…

   
   


2. 
   

   … and they turned it into 3 completely separate steps which are confusing, difficult, hidden, time-consuming, takes extra knowledge & extra time, and doesn’t work on mobile web browsers.

   
   


3. 
   

   The only good thing to come out of this change, as @Kamille_Parks mentioned above, is that Airtable no longer creates an extraneous field if you cancel out of the field creation process.

   
   

Everybody, please email support@airtable.com about this change. They are completely out of touch with their users, and they need to hear your complaints directly.

@Stephen_Suen @Alex.Wolfe @VictoriaPlummer @Halley_Johnson @somehats @Pooja_Raman @Shrey_Banga @Taylor_Savage @Adam_Minich

OMG.

This new customize field functionality is EVEN MORE INSANE than any of us have mentioned before. Here’s the 3rd thing which I didn’t even realize above:

3. Now when you create a new field, are you ready for this? Sit down for this one. The ABSOLUTE GENIUSES at Airtable have decided that we don’t need to see any of the options for the fields that we create. Whenever you create a new field, it doesn’t show you any of the options for that field. It literally just creates the field. So if you want to make ANY changes to the field options at all (even as simple as adding the “time” to a date field, or changing the options for a “last modified time” field, or ANY OPTIONS AT ALL ), you have to create the field once, then you have to GO BACK INTO THE CUSTOMIZE FIELD OPTION AGAIN to find the options and change the options. Oh, and then, you have to take a 3rd action to RENAME THE FIELD. So now, creating a field & choosing its options now takes 3 DISTINCT STEPS that are extremely confusing for the user (especially if the user doesn’t even know that there are options available): 1) create the field, 2) rename the field, 3) go back into the field customization and choose its options. What ever happened to keeping things easy & understandable & simple & straightforward for the user? The craziest thing of all is that the user DOESN’T EVEN KNOW THAT FIELD OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE ANYMORE. And for those that do, it takes MULTIPLE STEPS TO GET TO THOSE FIELD OPTIONS.

This is definitive proof to me that there is no adult supervision at Airtable. This is what happens when you put a bunch of millennials in a room and give them hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding, and don’t give them a project manager, and give all the engineers free reign to do whatever they want with the product. They run their product like a fraternity party.

THIS. IS. INFURIATING.

I’m currently considering completely walking away from Airtable at this point. I’m this close to pulling it down off of my website as a service that I provide, and I’m this close to no longer offering Airtable consulting or development anymore.

@Adam_Minich @Taylor_Savage @Aron @Katherine_Duh @Linjie_Ding @Jason @Michelle_Valentine @Stephen_Suen @Nicole_Hicks @Zoe_Bridges

There’s only 3? …

Happily I didn’t get the ‘Beta’ you are talking about !

Please @Taylor_Savage, @Jason leave my account as it is now, many thanks,

oLπ

@Olpy_Acaflo, hopefully you never get this beta. You will be entered into a world of pain. I have no idea how the Airtable Engineers could have ever thought up this monstrosity.

Hey all – thanks for all the feedback and discussion here. I will start by saying that YES we do look out for constructive feedback shared in our community forums. It’s one of many sources we use to identify new product features and improve people’s experience.

Now on to the questions about the “add field” flow. As @Justin_Barrett suspected, we’re exploring ways to expose more of our field types. We’ve heard from many people, particularly newer users, that they often don’t know about or understand how to use the variety of field types Airtable currently offers. With this type of feedback, we often decide to run a test so we can gather real-world data to understand if one experience is better than another. This data helps us validate anecdotal feedback we hear in forums like these so we can decide whether to launch the feature to everyone using Airtable, continue further testing, or scrap the plan entirely. We typically announce features only once we’ve learned they’re useful to a majority of people using Airtable.

We know that tests can be disruptive, particularly for power users who are deeply familiar with our features and settings. But our goal with every test is to create a better experience for everyone on Airtable. Many of the features people know and love today are the result of tests just like this one.

So as we test potential changes to our “add field” flow we’ll continue iterating based on this and other feedback before making any decisions on how to move forward. In the meantime, given the clear reaction from folks in this thread, we’re removing you from the test so you will revert back to the “add field” flow you were accustomed to. If you know of others who have similar concerns – or if you want to continue helping us test potential changes to “add field” – please reach us at support@airtable.com.

Thanks again for your feedback and your continued support of Airtable!

Hey all – thanks for all the feedback and discussion here. I will start by saying that YES we do look out for constructive feedback shared in our community forums. It’s one of many sources we use to identify new product features and improve people’s experience.

Now on to the questions about the “add field” flow. As @Justin_Barrett suspected, we’re exploring ways to expose more of our field types. We’ve heard from many people, particularly newer users, that they often don’t know about or understand how to use the variety of field types Airtable currently offers. With this type of feedback, we often decide to run a test so we can gather real-world data to understand if one experience is better than another. This data helps us validate anecdotal feedback we hear in forums like these so we can decide whether to launch the feature to everyone using Airtable, continue further testing, or scrap the plan entirely. We typically announce features only once we’ve learned they’re useful to a majority of people using Airtable.

We know that tests can be disruptive, particularly for power users who are deeply familiar with our features and settings. But our goal with every test is to create a better experience for everyone on Airtable. Many of the features people know and love today are the result of tests just like this one.

So as we test potential changes to our “add field” flow we’ll continue iterating based on this and other feedback before making any decisions on how to move forward. In the meantime, given the clear reaction from folks in this thread, we’re removing you from the test so you will revert back to the “add field” flow you were accustomed to. If you know of others who have similar concerns – or if you want to continue helping us test potential changes to “add field” – please reach us at support@airtable.com.

Thanks again for your feedback and your continued support of Airtable!

Hey all – thanks for all the feedback and discussion here. I will start by saying that YES we do look out for constructive feedback shared in our community forums. It’s one of many sources we use to identify new product features and improve people’s experience.

Now on to the questions about the “add field” flow. As @Justin_Barrett suspected, we’re exploring ways to expose more of our field types. We’ve heard from many people, particularly newer users, that they often don’t know about or understand how to use the variety of field types Airtable currently offers. With this type of feedback, we often decide to run a test so we can gather real-world data to understand if one experience is better than another. This data helps us validate anecdotal feedback we hear in forums like these so we can decide whether to launch the feature to everyone using Airtable, continue further testing, or scrap the plan entirely. We typically announce features only once we’ve learned they’re useful to a majority of people using Airtable.

We know that tests can be disruptive, particularly for power users who are deeply familiar with our features and settings. But our goal with every test is to create a better experience for everyone on Airtable. Many of the features people know and love today are the result of tests just like this one.

So as we test potential changes to our “add field” flow we’ll continue iterating based on this and other feedback before making any decisions on how to move forward. In the meantime, given the clear reaction from folks in this thread, we’re removing you from the test so you will revert back to the “add field” flow you were accustomed to. If you know of others who have similar concerns – or if you want to continue helping us test potential changes to “add field” – please reach us at support@airtable.com.

Thanks again for your feedback and your continued support of Airtable!

Thanks for describing where the experimental workflow causes confusion, @ScottWorld.

Our Product and Engineering team is actively iterating on this experiment based on the points you make here and additional feedback we have received through support@airtable.com. We appreciate constructive feedback.

Welcome to the Airtable community, and thank you for chiming in on this hot topic!

Thank you for the clarification on this. While I know that Airtable does read these forums, it isn’t always clear which sections and threads are read by Airtable staff. The official guidelines (which I quoted above) state that we can’t count on Airtable reading any specific thread.

When you do testing like this, it would be nice if you start a community thread announcing that you are doing testing and make it clear that Airtable will read the responses in that specific thread (even if you don’t answer all of them). With the current system you have lots of users blindsided by the changes with no idea where to provide feedback. Plus, when we contact support, the support staff then has to filter the testing feedback from all other support requests and forward them to the proper people. It would be nice to be able to send our feedback in a place that will directly reach those doing the testing, and to put it in a place that other community records can see and react to.

The number of field types can definitely be overwhelming. Would it be possible for you to present field types in categories in addition to the long list? Text based fields, computed fields, linked record related fields, number based fields, date/time fields, frequently used field types, favorites, etc.? Some field types might appear in multiple groups. For example, “last modified time” might appear in both the “date/time” category and the “computed” category. A “choice” category could include single-select, multi-select, and checkbox. You could also include a subtle link to your support website that discusses the different field types.

It wasn’t clear who you are referring to in in this statement, as you post doesn’t have a “reply to” icon attached to it. Could you please clarify? There are several people who expressed dissatisfaction with the current design, but some of them might want to continue to participate in the testing.

Thank you so much for your response & your community engagement here, @Zoe_Bridges!

It is very refreshing, and I am deeply grateful to hear from you regarding this.

My account hasn’t been removed from this beta test yet, but I also thank you in advance for removing me.

One thing I would consider is that if users aren’t understanding how to use the variety of field types that Airtable currently offers, it doesn’t make it any easier for them by shielding them from the different options associated with those fields. It only makes things more difficult for them, because then they have to go through an unintuitive discovery process all on their own.

For example, if you create a “Last Modified Time” field, but you no longer show them all the different options that are associated with that field, they might never realize that there is a whole world of options available to them that are associated with their brand new field. They would have to somehow figure out on their own that there are more options available, and that they would need to choose “customize field type” to see these options. But at first glance, “customize field type” just seems like you are changing the field type — not that there are suddenly more options available. (This applies to all fields, not just “Last Modified Time” field.)

Plus, there is now a disparity between “creating a field” and “changing a field type”. When you create a field, you’re hidden from all the options. But when you change a field type, all the options show up again.

Plus, for experienced users who already know about this, they simply want to set all the options when first creating the field. They don’t want to go through 2 steps just to create the field & then go back again to set the options. It was all one easy & unified step before. It was super intuitive & user-friendly in the past.

Plus, there’s now a 3rd step — you have to rename the field after creating it.

So it doesn’t seem like this makes things easier for new users… it seems like it makes things more difficult & confusing & hidden.

However, one great change here is that you can cancel out of creating a new field, and the field won’t be created.

Anyways, thank you so much for chiming in on this thread. It is very much appreciated!

Thanks so much for getting back to us, Zoe. My user account doesn’t have this removed yet.

Edit - I cannot express really how much I need this removed as quickly as possible. Anything you can do to ensure I never have to select field type first would be amazing! It is a total travesty

Edit edit - I mean, I’m on here just to have a moan because it feels more productive than trying to just simply create a field in Airtable. :face_vomiting: , and since this update I’ve been disinclined to use it.

Edit edit edit - Here’s a gif, which I hope remains here for posterity, as a reminder of the 8+ days or so, when Airtable made their core functionality redundant and overwhelming