@Zoe_Bridges: Because you guys have rolled out this feature to so many people, you guys have created a ton of confusion amongst tons of people, and you have created way more support inquiries than necessary.

Why? Because now, when people create new fields, they AREN’T SHOWN ALL OF THEIR OPTIONS FOR THAT FIELD, so there is absolutely no way for them to realize that they have to GO BACK A SECOND TIME to find all the “hidden options“ for their field.

For example, this recent thread involved time zones — but how in the world is anybody supposed to know that a time zone option even exists if they’re not shown it when they create the field?

For new users, they need to see all of their options when creating a field. This is basic common sense & logic.

And for experienced users, we want to choose all of our options in one fell swoop. We don’t want to waste our time by creating a field once, and then going back a 2nd time to rename our field, and then going back a 3rd time to choose our options.

Why would you guys make us repeat an action 3 times, when it used to only take us one time to take that action?

Honestly, the more I experience the detrimental & arbitrary changes that Airtable makes to the product, and the more I see Airtable ignoring important product suggestions that people have been requesting in these forums for literally 4 years, the less & less faith I have in the platform.

There is LITERALLY A WALL between what the users are saying and what the Airtable team is hearing. I’ve never experienced anything like this before in my 30 years of software development.

@ScottWorld Thank you for sharing. I’ve raised this to the engineer and designer experimenting in this space and they are appreciative for the feedback. Their goal is to help more new users engage with various field types, not to add friction to field setup.

Are there other fields, in addition to the date field, where you not being able to select options at the point of creation is problematic? I’d love to provide them a more complete point of view of the community’s feedback.

I hope everyone has a nice weekend.

I think that the number one thing that would help new users engage with the various field type would be when creating a field to present categories of fields, not just a long list of fields.

Trying to tweak presenting the long list of field types before or after you name the field won’t solve things when the problem is the fact that it is a long list that doesn’t have a clear order. So, make that list easier to mentally manage by making it mentally smaller with categories.

I actually don’t care if it takes me a few more mouse clicks to work my way through selecting categories because if the categories are well thought out it will actually be less overall effort. I’d be trading keyboard strokes (starting to type the field type) for mouse clicks (click the category, then click the field type) when I’m already using the mouse.

Categories of field types will also help users understand that some data types are more closely related to each other than others. For example, by putting rollups and lookups in the same category when clicking to create a new field, it will help transition new users who understand lookups to consider rollups as a similar type of field.

That’s a great idea that @kuovonne came up with. My favorite database program, FileMaker, organizes much of their interface by categories as well — but they also give the user a choice to organize alphabetically as well.

In Airtable’s case, it seems like you guys have organized by “most frequently-used fields” to “least-used fields” — that actually makes a lot of sense to me, too.

I like having all 3 options: (1) sort by category, (2) sort alphabetically, and (3) sort by most frequently-used fields.

Personally, I’ve never had a problem with having a long list of field types, but giving different sorting options could be helpful.

ALL FIELDS.

I was once a new Airtable user myself just a few years ago — and the #1 thing that helped me understand fields the most was that whenever I created a new field, ALL OF MY OPTIONS were right there in front of me! (Including renaming the field!) It was such a great gift to be shown all the different options for each field.

And now that I’m a seasoned Airtable user, the thing I appreciate THE MOST is being able to customize everything about a field in one easy step.

So, personally, I really don’t think there was ANYTHING wrong with the old interface at all. It was perhaps one of the most elegant & most well-thought-out parts of the interface. It was one of the few parts of Airtable that DIDN’T cause frustration!

I don’t know the inner workings of Airtable as a company, but it seems like each engineer is independently working on their own “pet projects”. I don’t think this is a good idea. Someone needs to be the “product manager” who oversees direction of the product, because there is a much larger, much bigger picture that you guys are missing. And that bigger picture is that there are actual problems & much-needed features in the product that people have been voicing their concerns about for years on end in these forums.

I’ve never heard anyone complain about confusion in creating/customizing fields — it was one of the very few parts of the product that worked perfectly. It should have been marked off as “complete” years ago. Yet every other part of your product is riddled with problems, and you guys look the other way.

There are TONS of things — both small & large — that people HAVE been complaining about for years, and they continue to go ignored by Airtable. There doesn’t seem to be someone who is acting as a product visionary or a product leader or a community engagement person.

p.s. @Zoe_Bridges, here is another example of how much Airtable has confused new users by hiding field customization upon field creation!

Here are just a few more comments to balance the discussion. :winking_face:

I have no inside track at all with Airtable but this is clearly not the case. It may seem that it is, but I’m almost certain it’s not and you’re getting these sensations from anecdotal experiences at best.

Airtable could not achieve the level of platform work associated with a specific individual or even a small team. Read this documentation and just imagine the coordinated effort that their entire company had to engage in to make this stuff work. Furthermore, it works well, and it’s highly performant. And, for the most part, there are no disconnects with the product features. This is not easy to achieve.

This is an absolute fact if we can consider the community as a deep representation of customer sentiment. In fact, I searched my ElasticSearch index of the entire community for the past five years and only 6 instances where UI issues concerning field creation popped up and they were unrelated and/or user errors.

If we can use the community data as evidence, the user base seems to have had zero issues with the way it previously worked. I get it - sometimes changes are required in advance of new features, but if that’s at the root of this change, it should be clearly communicated and rolled out in concert with some clear roadmap content explaining why this was necessary (e.g. Apple Lightning Cable - people wanted thinner phones; lightning made this possible).

This is undeniable as well and the data in the community messages prove it. What’s the status of my pet peeve Split()? Been asking for it for three years. Needed by almost every user for 7 years. It’s a weekend task for a junior-level engineer. ssigh]

@ScottWorld is right again and I rarely agree 80% of the time with him about anything.

Airtable needs a face of technical leadership; one mind, one face, one presence that is fully apprised of all things product management. A liaison who works tirelessly to triage issues and convey them to development while carrying back knowledge from the dev team to the community. There are people in this community who try to help Airtable do this - some are at it 7 days a week without any compensation. Where’s the equivalent Airtable resource that can engage at this level of technical competence while getting a fat paycheck and working as hard as some of your aftermarket developers?

I should have said “each engineering team”. I was told by an Airtable employee that each engineering team has autonomy to work on their own projects, and there is very little communication between teams. I was also told that there is no overall “product manager” overseeing Airtable. Each team has a product manager, but there is nobody overseeing the entire product. The CEO has always acted as the “product manager” up until now, but I suppose that he’s primarily busy trying to raise more VC funds.

All of this would perfectly explain why Airtable is such a dysfunctional product. For example, it would explain why button fields can’t trigger automations, or why Page Designer can’t be automated from anywhere. I mean, there are hundreds of example, but these are just 2 that popped into my head. It would also explain why features get released ONCE and then are left to sit idly & gather dust forever after that. (It might even explain why we unpaid volunteers who are here 7 days per week helping people for free know more about the product than many of their paid support agents do. It seems like each support agent is on their own to learn the product.)

I disagree. For example, Filemaker is a multi-billion dollar company owned by Apple, and their excellent database product is an enterprise-class product that helps run some of the world’s largest companies. Yet their documentation is written by a tiny team of people. I don’t know the exact number, but I’ve heard that it’s less than 5 people handling all of the documentation. In other words, the documentation people at a company are required to engage with all the engineering teams, but that doesn’t mean that teams are engaging with each other.

Lol!! I agree with everything else you’ve written above!! You totally nailed everything else.

Could not agree more with the comments here! Especially @kuovonne’s ideas around categories.

I’m kind of at a loss for words as to why we are still talking about this nearly a month later.

Because this bad change is still in the product.

Haha! Absolutely - I mean…Why is it still in the product :grinning_face_with_sweat:

I hope it is still this way because there is a better solution that is still in development.

I know - I worked with that tiny team in the late 90s; and it was just two people then. (yes, I’m that old)

But I’m not referring to the documentation. I’m referring to the underlying platform - a complexity so vast (as exhibited by the Blocks SDK documentation) that your initial assertion was likely in error. The platform is demonstrably far more complex than a group of freewheeling engineers or a collection of unguided engineering teams could create.

I understand you put a finer point on the “individual developer” nuance. Bottom line - you cannot paint their teams or their underlying accomplishments with a broad brush stroke; they are communicating with each other] in many ways and the evidence clearly shows this.

As to the other calamities, you are quite right about all your assertions. I’m anxious to learn about what @kuovonne is alluding to.

This is brilliant to be able to look at this sort of data, and know that almost NOBODY has ever had a problem with the field customization process. ALMOST ZERO.

Yet, we’ve had hundreds of people — perhaps thousands of people —perhaps MILLIONS of people :winking_face: — who have had problems with using curly quotation marks in the formula field! And Airtable can’t make their formula engine accept curly quotes?? Or, at the very least, Airtable can’t give users an error message that says “Sorry, the formula engine only accepts straight quotes.”??

This is a great example of the mis-prioritization that is happening with Airtable. So frustrating.

@Zoe_Bridges

I wasn’t alluding to anything. I was merely honestly stating that I really hope that they are developing something better. Many people complained about the view sidebar testing and there seemed to be little progress until suddenly the current sidebar design appeared, a new design that actually incorporated features suggested by this community.

I think that there is room for improvement in how to create and customize fields, although I won’t attempt to say how it should be prioritized. Anecdotally, I have seen new users intimidated by the array of field types.

I also think that there have been more than 6 instances where field creation and configuration issues have cropped up on this forum. For example, I have seen several issues relating to the fact that formula fields that show numbers default to displaying integers, but actually retain the decimal behind the scenes. Percent field types display as percents by are stored as decimals, which also causes unexpected results when they are used in formula fields. There are numerous issues that crop up related to time zones and local vs. gmt time for date/time fields. People, especially those with database experience, continue to be confused by how linked records work. Issues with lookup fields continue to plague people, and sometimes the solution is to use a rollup field instead. Are url and email fields actually different from single line text fields? I find myself often converting single line text fields to long text fields, not because the data is long but because I prefer the user interface for single line text fields There isn’t a json data type field, but using a long text field works just fine. Should there be a dedicated json field type anyway? There is no location field type, but people have been storing location data and have to decide what field type to use.

Of course, none of these issues relate to the order in which the field name and field type are chosen, which seemed to be the focus of the current testing.

Oh, and to throw out another suggestion @Zoe_Bridges, please think about putting the field description and field-level permissions on the field customization screen, perhaps on different tabs?

It’s difficult to write a query in ElasticSearch that will expose these nuances. My search focused on the key topic of creating fields looking for the keywords that @ScottWorld described in his initial comment.

Thank you @kuovonne for the thoughtful suggestions around improved field ordering, categorization, and description location.

We will continue to consider feedback surfaced in the community forum for this experiment and future product updates. We appreciate everyone’s feedback and continued support of Airtable.

@Zoe_Bridges Thank you for letting us know that Airtable is still monitoring this thread and considering future product updates.

Here is a pie-in-the-sky list of ideas related to setting up and customizing fields.

I would like to see all of the following in a single field customization screen, possibly on different tabs, with consistent names across tabs for all field types. Note that some of these features do not exist yet.

• the name of the field


• the field type


• formatting options


• the field description


• a default value for the field


• possible values (for manually entered fields, e.g. minimum & maximum values)


• computation settings for computed fields


• an icon to show in the user interface next to the field name

Formatting options would include anything that affects the display of the value but not how the value is stored internally. Examples of current formatting options include the currency unit in currency fields, the time format in time fields, format of duration fields, and the icon in rating fields. For date/time fields, the option to show local time versus gmt time would should also go under a “formatting” tab to make it more clear to users that choosing local time only affects how the time is displayed, and not how it is stored.

Rules for possible values already exist in a limited sense. Rating fields have a maximum value. You can limit linked record fields to a single value. Number fields can exclude negative numbers. You can limit new linked records to a view. People have been asking for more data validation rules, especially ranges for number fields. People also want to prevent creation of new possible values in single select and multi-select fields.

Many of Airtable’s field types are more about the appearance of a value versus how the value is actually stored. For example, a currency field is basically a number field with a currency symbol. A percent field is a number field with a shifted decimal place and a percent symbol. A duration field is a number field with fancy display options. An email field is basically a single line text field with a different icon in the field column heading. You can reduce the number of field types and shift these appearance issues to formatting options.

(I am treading close to Bill’s idea of having formulas applied to any field type, but I don’t want to go there right now.)

Impressive and very thoughtful.

Airtable should employ you as a product requirements manager. Seriously; they should do this right now. Even on a contractual basis - this is precisely the level of consideration and skill to assess the best interests of users that is deparately needed inside their organization.

I disagree; you are being too modest. :winking_face: This is a list of key requirements to advance the usability while softening the margins between everyday users and the deeper technical aspects of a database tool.

Honestly, @Zoe_Bridges, these changes would be incredible. I never realized how overwhelming all the fields were until @kuovonne’s suggestions. i have absolutely felt confused while trying to understand the purpose of each field type. Why is there an email field type?? I just accepted I was missing something

I hope Airtable implements at least the suggestion to condense similar fields into option menus. That would be huge!

Totally. I can say with 100% certainty that there is no single individual at Airtable with the skills + the overall product knowledge that @kuovonne has. This is the sort of person that Airtable is sorely lacking right now.

We also have to remember that most of the hires at Airtable have no prior database experience, which makes for a subpar product. People like @kuovonne, @Bill.French, and myself come from DECADES of database experience with high-end database systems.

Thank you for the kind words, but I’m surprised at these comments and I’m curious how you came to these conclusions. There are many very knowledgeable people at Airtable. They just don’t tend to post on these forums very much. As for prior database experience of new hires, I don’t see how you could know statistics on this without being part of Airtable’s HR.

@kuovonne

I’m also a psychic! ‍♂

I’ve had some private conversations with folks at Airtable. My personal takeaway — and this is just my own personal interpretation of what I’ve learned — is that the engineers may indeed have prior experience, but the technical "barrier to entry“ to get hired on the support team or in other non-engineering roles is very low.

But YOU are the hero we need! :star_struck: :partying_face:

4 months gone and Airtable is at it again. I have no idea why they keep messing with this - Of all the features of the app…This was maybe the lowest priority to be changed. (It didn’t need changed at all)

I have grown to really dislike Airtable’s cavalier approach to messing with process critical pieces of a user flow.

I’ve yet again been pushed a set up that, (yet again), tries to force me to choose field type upon creating a field.

I honestly only have rage in me right now, as I type - and rage + forums tends not to end well for anyone… But I do honestly hope the UX designer of this feature, packs in their experiments, changes field creation back to how it was in August 2020, and actually goes to work on something useful. Because this is infuriating!

Here’s what’s wrong with it… On the off chance that UX team is interested

1. This area is for re-setting my mouse. …Not for creating a new column! When I want a new column! , I purposefully click ‘+’
   
   
   


2. Why do I need to explain that this should be a “Create Field” button and not a cancel button. Why on earth are you making it more difficult for me to create a field? This is the most outrageous and arrogant UX decision I’ve ever encountered. I’ve just clicked create a field - AND YOU LITERALLY HIDE THE BUTTON THAT ALLOWS ME TO DO THAT!!! Is your assumption that I did this by accident? Are you that insecure about your UX that you assume I don’t just actually want to create a field


3. Why does “Enter” create a field here, but “Command + Enter” does nothing. Just using general UX conventions…“Command+Enter” should create the field, and “Enter” should take the user to the next stage in the menu (if Enter, really needs to do anything at all)

I’m so, sorry for the rage, but I am just so exhausted with this. I spend 80% of my day in Airtable, and as a hugfe champion of your software, I feel alienated and ignored while you experiment with the wrong things. There are a million things you can go tinker with…Stop messing with the one thing that did not need changed… Please

I’m confused. Aside from the period of time when the tweak that prompted this thread was active for select users (not me, thankfully), choosing a field type upon field creation has been part of the UI ever since I started using Airtable nearly two years ago. Are you suggesting that there should be a default type, that creating a new field should instantly add a field using that default type, and that the user would choose another type if they don’t want the default? Or does your comment above contain a typo?

That aside, I think you used just the right amount of red in your post (emojis included) because that space to the right of the last field no longer acts as a trigger area for creating a new field. It was the way you describe earlier today, but I just checked, and it’s gone now.

I totally agree with you. This is very disappointing, and very rage-inducing.

Unfortunately, this is yet another one of those crazy beta tests where Airtable has rolled out this “new feature” to some workspaces, but not all workspaces.

Once again, the Airtable engineers are tweaking things that don’t need to be tweaked, while ignoring the fixes that need to be fixed.

And now, they have suddenly come to the crazy conclusion that users of Airtable are constantly wanting to create new fields! They apparently think that all day long we’re just creating new fields in Airtable, and we don’t want to do anything else in Airtable.

Think about that for a moment — the Airtable engineers apparently sat around and said, “what can we possibly do to make people accidentally create new fields all day long as they’re using our product?”

And what was their brilliant solution?

Their brilliant solution was to make the ENTIRE RIGHT HAND SIDE OF THE ENTIRE SCREEN CLICKABLE — so now, whenever somebody is trying to “reset their mouse” (as @andywingrave said above) or simply click out of a record, now there are brand new fields being created instead.

Is there a lack of sanity at Airtable, @Jason? @Adam_Minich? @Linjie_Ding? @Taylor_Savage? @Zoe_Bridges? As @andywingrave mentioned, It’s truly getting exhausting at this point.

Why do you insist on making us fight your product every day? How do you expect us to be evangelists of your product if you keep doing these sorts of things to us? You refuse to have any sort of a dialogue with us, yet you continually tweak your product in destructive ways — things that have been working 100% perfectly fine. Why do you show such disregard for us?

Everybody who chimed in on this thread THOUGHT that this entire thread was closed & resolved by now, but nope. They’re still tweaking things to make things worse.

And — get this — guess what else they have destroyed? The “view” menu again. Remember how we all finally got Airtable to fix the “view” menu back in Fall 2020? Remember how we all thought that the discussion on the “View” menu was closed & resolved?

NOPE. Airtable had to go back and ruin it again.

Are you ready for this?

Now, whenever you hover over the name of your current View with your mouse, you’re supposed to get that beautiful “hovering” side panel. I call it the “hover view menu”.

But guess what they’ve done? Unlike every other button in all of Airtable, they’ve made this “hover view menu” pay attention to WHICH DIRECTION YOUR MOUSE IS MOVING IN.

What this means is that you can ONLY TRIGGER THE HOVER VIEW MENU if you APPROACH THE MENU FROM UNDERNEATH. If you approach the “hover view menu” from any other direction, it doesn’t trigger. (Take your mouse and approach the name of your current view. It will only trigger if you approach it from underneath.)

My clients and myself are so incredibly agitated by this ridiculous decision which makes no sense whatsoever. I’m in the middle of a busy workday now, but I will make a video of this and create a separate post on this issue soon.

Is there ANYBODY at Airtable who cares about our user experience? ANYBODY who wants to create dialogue or discussion with us? Is there any hope on the horizon that you WANT to engage with your best evangelists on the planet? The people who are your biggest cheerleaders everyday?