Product Suggestion: Please stop showing new View Sidebar

Airtable should not force the All Views left sidebar into all my bases. This is extremely annoying and invasive. I don’t need that view. It is distracting to always have to close it every time I open a base. Airtable should allow users the option to disable that feature and return to how things were prior to a couple months ago…with the base opening and NOT showing All Views left sidebar.

Well, for a few weeks, Airtable temporarily fixed one of the 5 huge sidebar problems.

For a few weeks, upon opening a base from the Home Screen, the sidebar finally respected our previous selection of whether the sidebar was opened or closed.

But now, the sidebar has gone back to its previous bad behavior:

Now, whenever we open a base from the Home Screen, the sidebar ALWAYS re-opens again.

This really needs to be fixed.

I have no idea why Airtable is trying to shove the sidebar in our face at all times — it feels like they’re standing on the side of the road, frantically jumping up & down and waving their arms, shouting “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!” It’s almost like they feel like the sidebar is the MOST IMPORTANT part of Airtable… and that it constantly needs to be shoved in our face.

I have no idea what the thinking is behind this, but please, Airtable, WE GET IT. We understand that there’s a View sidebar. We applaud you for having different views in your product. Big pats on the back and high-fives all the way around. But we don’t need this shoved in our face at all times. We KNOW IT’S THERE. Just like every other button on the toolbar. We KNOW that the buttons are there. Everybody can see the toolbar. Everybody can see the options. PLEASE stop forcing this on us.

THANK YOU.

@Adam_Minich

I just discovered problem #6 with the view sidebar:

If we close a base and re-open it later, Airtable doesn’t remember the previous WIDTH that we set our sidebar to. So every time we re-open a base, we have to constantly re-adjust the width of our sidebar.

@Adam_Minich

It appears Airtable may have addressed several of your concerns:

@Jeremy_Oglesby

Yes! Thank you! :slightly_smiling_face: As of this week, they have now fixed essentially 100% of the problems with the sidebar, even the brand new problems that I just discovered a few weeks ago!! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: :raised_hands: :sparkles: :dizzy: :star2: :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

So, I feel like everything is pretty much resolved at this point regarding the new sidebar. I’m super thrilled with the progress they’ve made on this. :slightly_smiling_face:

This really feels like an elegant part of the user interface now, and it should hopefully appeal to everyone — no matter what their preferences are. It really feels like a delight to use now. :slightly_smiling_face:

At this point, the only remaining “problems” are not even “problems” anymore, but simply “feature requests” or “personal preferences” that might improve things just a tiny bit more:

1. I LOVE the “slide over” behavior of the sidebar. It only appears momentarily while you choose a view, and then it slides out of view again when you’re done switching views. This is fantastic! Perfect behavior. However, the sidebar often accidentally appears when we’re just trying to move our mouse towards the direction of the first tab (i.e. we’re trying to go back to the first table). So perhaps the sidebar could have a little bit lengthier delay before opening when our mouse moves over the name of the view.

2. I would love it if the sidebar applied its settings to individual TABLES instead of the entire BASE. That way, we could have one table where the sidebar is open & wide, another table where the sidebar is open & narrow, another table where the sidebar is closed altogether, etc.

3. I feel like it could be a little more helpful if the “Views” button was full width at all times. That way, you could hover your mouse over any area of the word “Views” and keep clicking your mouse in the same exact spot — and the sidebar would open or close. Currently, if you close the Views menu but then you realize that you need to immediately re-open it again, you often have to “chase” the button because the button has narrowed itself down again. For all the other buttons (Sort, Filter, Color, etc.), you can just keep your mouse hovered on top of them in the exact same spot and keep clicking to open or close the buttons. The “View” button is the only button that changes its width while your mouse is still hovering there. (The other buttons do change their width too, but not until you have already moused away from them to click on something else.)

Besides those 3 feature requests, I feel like everything is perfect now!

Thanks to the Airtable team for radically improving this! :slightly_smiling_face:

Hi @ScottWorld

Great work in pursuing this!

It makes it better for the rest of us.

Thank you!

Mary

Nice job on the View Sidebar fix, but it would be nice if when hovering a view it would show the full view name (which I believe it did originally).
Right now when hovering and it is an personal view it says “Your personal view”, which I already know because by profile photo is next to the view :slightly_smiling_face:

So this view sidebar has become a real problem again.

In Airtable’s infinite wisdom, they have now COMPLETELY DISABLED THE HOVERING FEATURE if you directionally approach the “View” button (or view name) with your mouse in a downward direction (i.e. moving your mouse downwards from above the view button).

In other words, if you switch tabs in Airtable, and then you move your mouse downwards from the tabs over the “View” button (or the view name), it won’t register the mouse hover anymore. It is now completely unresponsive, unless you KEEP MOVING YOUR MOUSE UNDERNEATH THE BUTTON, and then approach the view button with your mouse from underneath.

Yes, this was done by design. Yes, I’m 100% serious about this. You literally cannot make this stuff up, folks. Fact is stranger than fiction. Or maybe there’s just a lot of champagne flowing after their latest funding round! :crazy_face: :champagne:

If anyone has a brick wall I can borrow, I’d love to bang my head against this brick wall once a day in response to the engineering decisions that are made at Airtable. I know that brick walls are expensive to ship, but it will be worth it to me.

The view panel was changed again this week, and there are some immediate problems with it.

#1. BUG: If you hover your mouse over the view name, the hover window appears. This is good. However, if you choose one of the options from the new dropdown menu (see screenshot below), and then you hover your mouse back over the view name again, the hover window DOESN’T appear.

#2. ANNOYANCE: The new tooltip is very annoying (see screenshot below).

Every time you hover over the view name, it now gives you the paragraph that you see in the screenshot below (or a different paragraph, depending on the type of view).

a) It’s really unnecessary to see this paragraph every time you choose a new view. It makes no sense to keep reminding people of this obvious information over & over & over again. Once somebody understands it, they don’t need to keep getting reminded of it continuously.

b) It also obscures the “Find A View” field which is directly underneath it.

c) However, even worse, this tooltip appears before the TRULY IMPORTANT tooltip appears, which is the full name of your view (if the view name is very lengthy).

If this new behavior annoys you too, please be sure to email support@airtable.com about this.

@Adam_Minich @Rose_K @Linjie_Ding @Zoe_Bridges @Taylor_Savage @Stephen_Suen @Rob_Hildebrandt

I don't mind the appearance of the sidebar, so maybe this is a different annoyance, but I *really* wish the height of the  "create" portion of the sidebar could be changed. It takes up way too much space and means I have to scroll within the scroll to see my views.

We rely on views (collaborative and personal) to generate data and wow, I have 10, but there could be 100s and it's such a pain to scroll through! The search bar is ok but if we have 10 views and don't know the name of the view we're looking for, it's useless.  I even have to scroll to see anything but the section "My favorites."

I feel l