Every single time I’m in a client’s base, I need to remove multiple fields and records that were created like this. So no, it’s not just you.

@andywingrave I completely agree with your post 100%. Everything you said is spot-on.

I also agree with you about my for Airtable, despite its never-ending & massively increasing list of flaws, bugs, problems, missteps, poor interface decisions, unresponsive team, incomplete features, and half-baked features. (And I haven’t even posted my list of formula bugs yet.)

Airtable is a deeply flawed product, yet the still remains. Perhaps the for Airtable is so strong because it is such a fun & whimsical product? We all need more fun & whimsy in our lives.

However, I have frustratingly bad news to report. Keeping in alignment with the misguided nature of Airtable, Airtable Technical Support just emailed me back yesterday about the very topics you discuss above, and they told me that the Airtable Product Team has ZERO PLANS to fix any of the things you outlined above.

That’s right… you read that correctly… Airtable has effectively shut down our voices (yet again). In their infinite wisdom, they have now doubled down on these detrimental user interface decisions, and they have apparently been solidified into the product. Apparently, they are 100% committed to this, as they have told me that they have no plans to reverse these decisions.

I’ve been in the database industry for 37 years, and I’ve never experienced anything like this before. I’ve never experienced a product as dysfunctional as Airtable, and I’ve never experienced a team that cares so little about its users. And it feels like it gets worse every day.

Although I have to admit that I’m in this for the long haul just like you are, because:

(a) I still the whimsical nature of Airtable, and

(b) My thriving & successful consulting business is primarily fueled by all things Airtable-related: Airtable consulting, Airtable development, Airtable training, and Airtable integrations. I also do high-end certified FileMaker development, but the ratio of Airtable to FileMaker inquiries through my website is at least 20:1 (Airtable:FileMaker inquiries).

So I’m not going anywhere. But the product is deeply flawed on many levels.

I just wish that the Airtable team ACTUALLY cared about us, ACTUALLY cared about our voices, and ACTUALLY cared about our user experiences. But they seem to be in their own world over there, and we are in our own world over here. And the two worlds do not coexist. And my guess is that the problems we are experiencing as outsiders are probably the same problems they are facing within their own organization. Can you imagine how dysfunctional the inner workings of their company must be?

I believe that the key problem here is that the Airtable Product Team has probably never attempted to use their own product on a daily basis. It’s the classic case of engineers not eating their own dog food. We see this all the time in the software industry, and my guess is that this is what’s happening here. They seem to have no idea how awful the user experience is (and as evidenced by all the unanswered threads in this community, they do not care). If they were forced to actually use their own product for 2 weeks nonstop, I guarantee you that they would realize the errors of their ways. But they can never understand unless they try to use their own product on a daily basis. They need to eat their own dog food.

Of course, this thread will fall on deaf ears. It’s frustrating to watch them damage so much goodwill. Why would they actively betray their biggest cheerleaders & their biggest evangelists & their biggest fans? I have no idea.

Lemme’ guess - @andywingrave is from the UK and for those of you unfamiliar with the colloquial use of the term “mad” (i.e., the Queen’s Language, e.g., grammatically correct utterances free of slang), allow me to add an interpretation nuance to accentuate just how “mad” these changes really are. :winking_face:

Mad as in …

• Nutty


• Cooky


• Crazy


• Bonkers


• Dumbassery


• What the **** were you thinking?

It’s a joke really. And everytime I post some critique, my posts get flagged and my account is suspended for some days…

Already mentioned their total lack of real interaction with their users to @Aron_Korenblit / @Aron in June 2020:

As mentioned, the lack of interaction with the community, especially on no brainer topics that are going on for years is not ok. Really, it’s not.

Hoping that this message contributes to some awareness.

Apparently, it created ZERO awareness… And yet, every week, we are selling Airtable to companies and have to explain why some simple things are still not possible and no perspective is offered. It’s time someone at Airtable stepped up his/here game.

Edit: meanwhile, there are 49 employees who should/could be active in this community, even big chief @Howie_Liu himself.

@Jason Hey Jason! I’d love someone from the product team to engage with this thread if possible. Would just love some context on these decisions, which make the UI less consistent and as a consequence making Airtable more difficult to use.

Hey @andywingrave, sure thing. Let me check in with our product team and I’ll make sure we continue this discussion.

Wowza Scott! Don’t hold back, tell us how you REALLY feel

Hope that was a cleansing experience and Airtable doesn’t fill you with rage every time you approach the keyboard. You don’t paint a pretty picture, which gives me the willys, given my hopes for Airtable at our organization, and your long experience.

As a former tech lead on the other side of the equation though, I’d like to make an observation or two for a few of the other community members (I’m guessing these are no news to you

Developers want customers to love the products they work on, but developers, senior development architects and team leads are usually neither decision makers or communicators. They can suggest new features and architectural changes but product management, sales, and the bean counters impose the constraints and decide what customer requests are prioritized, which ones are at the bottom of the queue, and which ones are ignored.

Technical support organizations don’t write code and they don’t have much say in setting priorities. The good ones can provide input, but they are farther from the decision-making process than the development group is in my experience. Maybe they DO know what the development team is planning but I’m skeptical.

We don’t know all the resource constraints the Airtable organization faces; if their development budget was cut due to conditions we know nothing of, or if they are hard at work on a major new feature and can’t switch gears right now. We don’t know if their development group experienced a brain drain to another company, or if they are in the process of replacing a key manager with someone more receptive to your concerns.

I don’t mean to exonerate Howie Liu and the Airtable organization from anything; as a newbie I’m just willing to cut them some slack, and I admit I’ve not been an Airtable customer half as long as you have.

I know that the UI has some warts; but the overall ability of the company to make database and spreadsheet features as simple as they are so normal people can actually pick them up, produce useful software, and be happy and passionate about it impresses me.

This approachable DB/spreadsheet mix is something that lots of folks have been striving for since the days of Lotus 1-2-3. I don’t know of anything that played in this space so well between then and Airtable’s release.

Back a decade or two when I worked at Oracle I found our end user app development tools clunky and hard to use and hard to setup. Oracle has a lot of resources but they couldn’t get their forms and other end use development apps even close to the Airtable ease of use. I bought MS Access V1 in the ‘90s the month it came out, love it, and have developed lots of Applications and tools with it, but Airtable gets users started in hours with lots of what an RDBMS provides. It would take months for the same ‘normal’ non-technical person to learn on their own to do that stuff in Access.

I’m mostly ignorant of the Airtable organization. I can be way off the mark here and don’t mind being corrected in my observations; hoping to learn from them.

I think a lot of long-time contributors here share similar discomfort but I assure you, it is not @ScottWorld’s comments that has created this discomfort. Airtable has done a fine job digging this trench. :winking_face:

I agree with this assertion. This is almost always the case in companies where product management plays a pivotal role. However, there are vast instances in this forum where product management is simply MIA. There are many cases where users have begged product management to weigh in and weeks later - still crickets. This is not to suggest that they aren’t listening, but they truly aren’t engaging in a broadly perceptible way. Likewise, they aren’t engaging on the axis of road-map, compass heading, or anything that would assist aftermarket resellers and consultants to more efficiently help their paying customers achieve greater success.

On the upside, over the past 18 months or so I have seen a significant pile of evidence they are truly listening and reacting in generally favourable ways to make the product better. That’s the good news.

We have seen instances where it appears that people in support roles are actually building features.

Um actually, since VisiCalc. :winking_face:

Thanks @Jason - It’s exhausting if I’m honest - I’m starting to really be concerned about these experiments - Here’s another two changes that have happened in the past few weeks that are just really frustrating, and unnecessary:

Here’s an example of just plain bad UX that’s suddenly made its way into production…Single select = drop-down from right, User select = drop down from right , multi-select = go figure it out for yourself

…When they could have used this absolute beauty

And here’s another… This is just really frustrating - For some reason it is hypothesised that no matter what cell a user is on, they want their attention to be drawn to an empty checkbox???

Trust me - We don’t - It’s incredibly distacting.

I’m honestly really worried about the direction the UX is being taken. Airtable 3 years ago was this beautiful, functional and eminently usable product, and fast forward 3 years, it’s an absolute minefield with no concept of consistency, or consideration for user.

I need to clarify that this is absolutely NOT a power user issue! I work with new users primarily as a consultant, and they are often the ones to become frustrated at these additions.

Well stated…

They literally do not care. We are better off talking to a brick wall.

I know you were just pointing out some old interface changes, but remember that tech support told me that they are 100% committed to all the new interface changes, and that they will not be changing them. (I previously mentioned this in some thread somewhere.) They literally don’t care that our clients accidentally create hundreds of new records every day, and they literally don’t care that our clients accidentally create dozens of new fields every day.

Want to see dramatic improvements in Airtable? Require the Airtable engineers to exclusively use their own product (Airtable) every day for a month. I guarantee you that everything will radically improve within 30 days.

But until the Airtable engineers “eat their own dog food“ (that’s a software development phrase), they will never respect their users.

Are you sorting or filtering on that checkbox field?

I get the impression that Airtable is making these UX/UI decisions based on isolated issues, and not the entire experience. Most of these design changes make one specific thing easier … at the expense of the overall experience when the user is not interested in that specific thing.

Airtable has always had a beautiful looking user interface. As Airtable is trying to improve the usability of the interface, it is going through some growing pains. In some cases it seems like “the cure is worse than the disease.” Hopefully Airtable will discover better cures (UX/UI changes) without these undesirable side effects.

Actually, it’s not. In the 1970s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another early origin is from the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings. Both of these uses predate the software development market as we know it and literally are founded in the dog food market itself.

But I agree - Airtable engineers should feel good enough about their product to use it invariably to solve data management problems, and I suspect they do, but probably not in stringent ways.

Ha, I love learning about the incredible history of these widely-used phrases! Thank you!

What I meant was that I was not calling Airtable “dog food”, and that it is a commonly-used phrase in the software industry.

To some extent they do this already. Every beta that I’ve signed up for requires signing up through an Airtable form. When I submit details on a marketplace app, I do so through an Airtable form. Usually these forms have at least one value prefilled. Thus, they must be using Airtable for some of their internal processes.

There are reasons why Airtable using its own product internally might not produce the results you desire.

• 
  

  Airtable staff using Airtable have access to internal information on how the product works and why they are making the changes. When an Airtable staff member sees a highlighted column, they already know why it is highlighted and it isn’t as distracting. Airtable staff know what actions will create a new record, so they don’t do it when they don’t want to create a new record. Their knowledge of the product means that they simply aren’t as confused by these issues.

  
  


• 
  

  How Airtable staff uses Airtable internally might not match how your clients use Airtable. If the use cases are different, the users will prioritize different things from the user experience.

  
  

I didn’t sense that you were using dog food as a metaphor for the product itself; purely a figure of speech that appears to have merit.

Extremely important point. I also imagine that they are using it profusely inside Airtable but that their usage is also deeply biased to the point where their own work with the product could be working against them. This was apparent at Microsoft (Access), FoxPro (precursor to Access), dBase IV (Borland), etc. All of these teams grew disconnected as success and adoption rose. They each found ways to eliminate the internal biases to create solutions that reached very high user happiness quotients.

According to this page, Airtable is looking for a Quantitative User Experience Researcher and a User Experience Researcher.

Here are selected points under both “What you’ll do” headings. I find it an interesting list, both in what they include and what they don’t include. For example, there is no explicit mention of this community in either job posting. Nor is there a mention of interacting with 3rd party consultants or experts.

Bill, I agree about who’s the source of discomfort; Scott’s just the messenger.

Interesting that you guys are seeing evidence of support pushing features to production.

Yes, VisiCalc was the 1st spreadsheet (God bless Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston), but VisiCalc didn’t include an integrated database. I guess there are probably obscure footnote products that had the two, but it was Lotus’ claim to fame (along with Lotus notes.)

Hooray! They fixed this for fields! Thank you!!!

What did they fix?? Both myself and my clients are still struggling with clicking to the right of a grid view, and having a new field appear!! Soooooo annoying. It’s making my life a complete nightmare working in Airtable!

Sadly it was a bug @ScottWorld… It’s not fixed at all.

@Jason any news on this?

I just coached a new customer into Airtable, and it was an absolute disaster. Why won’t your team engage??

A wise friend who left Airtable for another product told me something enlightening about Airtable:

We’re not their customers. Their VC’s are.

Let that wise gem sink in for a moment.

And yes, this clicking to the right of the grid view thing is the most disastrous interface decision they’ve made in 5 years of disastrous interface decisions.

Hi all,

I’m Christy and I lead our product marketing team at Airtable. I apologize for the time it took for us to respond to this and the frustration you’re facing with accidental record creation.

Thank you so much for the candid feedback and insights. I wanted to give you additional background on why we rolled out this particular feature. We are always balancing the ways for our product to support our wide range of customers including those just getting started to those, like you, who are more seasoned experts.

For this particular change, I wanted to give you some background on why we’ve made the decisions we have:

We know that one of the biggest challenges new Airtable users face is getting their data out of where it’s currently stored and into Airtable. We also know that new Airtable users sometimes get confused about where they should add their information and that can keep them from getting value out of the tool right away.

By making it easy to add new records and fields to your Airtable base, we’ve seen new users get up and running with Airtable more quickly. Because we’ve seen such improvement from this design pattern with new users, we’ll be keeping it in place. That said, we recognize that this change is causing frustration for those that are very accustomed to using the product and hope that our future plans might help mitigate some frustration.

I realize that recognizing frustration isn’t the same as fixing it but I’m hoping that hearing the explanation of why we went in this direction will give you a greater understanding of our planning and decision-making process. We want to continue listening and collaborating with you every step of the way even if we disagree at times. With that in mind here are a few areas we are excited about (and hope you will be too!) with regards to product feedback and engagement:

Community engagement: Having an active, engaged community is not something we want to take for granted. In the coming months, we’ll be putting more resources towards our community program, including ways to keep our product team more involved in the community and give you more tools to give us feedback and get answers to your questions. We will be reaching out to many customers, including members of the Airtable Community to weigh in on our plans. You should start seeing and experiencing these changes during 2021.

Product updates: We know that being able to collaborate with team members, collaborators, and clients is key for workflows in Airtable. But we also know that it can be tricky. Different people need to see different cuts of data and not everyone should have the same level of editing access. Our team is actively working on giving you new collaboration tools and interfaces that help you manage your data in Airtable and better control so you can give your team members more of the information and data they need and less of what they don’t. We’ll be rolling out small collaboration improvements over the coming months, with a large update coming in the second half of this year.

I hope that peeling back the curtain on some of our internal processes and plans has helped give you more insight into our decision-making. Your feedback continues to be extremely valuable to us and we bring the feedback and requests we get from our community into our product road-mapping process each quarter as we create our plans and set our priorities.

Welcome to the Airtable community @Christy_Roach!

Thank you for taking the time to join the community and pull back the curtain a little.

Recognizing frustration is an important first step. Finding the right UX/UI design can be tricky, and recognizing pain points for everyone (new users, existing users, power users, etc.) is important. In this case, it feels like Airtable prioritized new users over existing users.

In my experience, new Airtable users do best when they either (1) have database experience already or (2) were personally introduced to Airtable by someone they know who already uses and likes Airtable. In addition to focusing on brand new users, maybe there can be an approach that supports the “mentoring” process beyond giving free credits for new account referrals?

I’m really sad to hear this. I believe that there are other UX/UI designs that could better accommodate both new and existing users. I suggested one upthread (or possibly in one of the related threads on this topic).

I’m super excited to hear this and look forward to seeing the changes. I’m also happy to provide feedback.

Being able to set permissions on who can see what would be huge. Note that this is different from more variations on personal views, since personal views don’t really restrict what a person can see.

I hope that you will announce these improvements in the community so that there will be official threads to post comments on. The announcements could include information on the rollout and how to provide feedback. In the past a few people discover new features and start their own threads, which leads to disjointed information and confusion when different people have different experiences.

The prospect of a large update in the second half of this year is also exciting. Thank you for this rare peak at your roadmap.

Yes. And I already submitted similar post and also petition to their support about adding a button in the user interface for new record. They said they will look into that but it has been a while already. My suggestion was to add a button in the interface to add new record. Logically, I would want to add new record just below the row I have selected. If no row is selected, the new record will be created as top most record. There is no really point of them having the plus signs on the table if the table has 1000 rows and I don’t scroll down every time to create new record. So yes, you got my vote.