New Base UI

I agree. I dislike this so much. I put a lot of effort into designing my two main bases with color and design to make them easy to work with and to read. This is truly awful to work with for me. 

What I dislike the most is that these and various other changes to my designs take effect without permission. “Oh, we did this for you.. You’re welcome.” Hours worth of work down the drain.

Please, change it back or give us the option!

Thank you.

hey ​@Valerie_Chamber and ​@Marc you might want to submit this as feature requests/product ideas using this form!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

​@Marc ​@Valerie_Chamber 

Unfortunately, Airtable doesn’t monitor our feedback here… it’s just fellow Airtable users here.

So I would BOTH email your feedback to support@airtable.com AND fill out this form.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Thank you! I emailed support and linked to this thread as well.

I don’t like emailing feedback of complaints but it is wildly frustrating when they change your layouts and designs without options. Shouldn’t we have more options and choices as the product evolves? Displaying a color header seems pretty basic.

Anyway, it has happened enough that I had to say something, so thanks for the tip. The colors are how I tell the bases apart and I have more than one open at one time. Two are synced together, in fact, and it is super important that I can tell at a glance which one is which.

If they take the colors from the interfaces, too, I will be completely lost. 

FYI… I entered my feedback into a chatbot at first, and it said that they completely understood that I don’t like it, but that it was not possible to revert to the old base layout and it will not be changing back. (I mean, it is possible, that’s just a choice that they made.) I forwarded the chatbot feedback to an actual human and I suppose that’s all I can do at this point. So if this change impacts anyone else, please let your voice be heard as they are reluctant to receive your feedback.

Update:

My response - 

>>It’s visual and impedes my workflow. It’s not something one gets used to. They either tolerate it or >>they don’t.

>>Again, thank you and I appreciate you passing it along because having a colored header really >>shouldn’t be an option that you remove from us. It’s super basic. If you take it away from the >>interfaces, too, I will be completely lost. I have no use for AI in Airtable. I just need it to do what it >>currently does in a way that works for our entire team and keeps us efficient and sane.

>>Thank you for listening.

From: Airtable Support <support@airtable.com>
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2025 2:45 PM
Subject: RE: You were mentioned in a post

Hello!

Brigitt here from Airtable! 👋🏻 I'd be happy to help.

Thanks for reaching out and taking the time to share your honest feedback about the recent UI changes in Airtable. We know that changes, particularly the reduced color and relocated functional actions, can take some time to get used to. Please know that we truly value your input and are actively listening to what our users are experiencing.

These changes are part of our recent AI-focused update, designed to create a more streamlined and intuitive experience that better supports AI-driven building and data analysis. This refresh is guided by a few core design principles:

• As our newest and most powerful offering, we aimed to make the Omni functionality and AI panel the most prominent feature, positioning it on the left side of the UI to emphasize its role as the primary interaction model.
• The overall base structure has been designed for a cleaner aesthetic, aiming for a less cluttered environment, especially when paired with the latest grid view redesign. This minimalist approach led to reducing the prominence of the base color in the data layer, though it remains in key areas like the base icon, share menu, and a colored bar indicating your current surface. You'll also see a pastel version highlighting tables within the data layer.
• We've worked to make sidebars and sub-navigations more consistent across Data, Automations, Interfaces, and Forms tabs, thereby achieving a more unified feel and making navigation easier across all platforms.

While we believe these changes will ultimately enhance the user experience by making Airtable more powerful and efficient with AI, we understand that adapting to new layouts can take time. Your feedback is crucial in helping us understand how these changes are impacting your workflow, and it helps us continue to refine and improve Airtable for everyone. I have passed your feedback to our Product team, including the context of your frustrations you shared.

If you have additional specific examples of where the changes are causing significant friction, please don't hesitate to share them. We're here to help you navigate this transition and ensure you can continue to get the most out of Airtable.

Thank you again for taking the time to share your feedback—it truly helps us continue to improve the Airtable experience for everyone.

Kind regards,

Brigitt Barcenas
Airtable Support

I am so with you guys! Mine just updated automatically today, and it really threw me! I sent feedback regarding dark mode and the recent UI changes.

I am really upset as well. Making it more uniform is not helpful. I have nearly a dozen bases, each with many tables. Color and contrast are the things that allow me to get where I need to go quickly. Everything looks the same now, and the pastel is useless. It just reduces the contrast and makes the text harder to see. Some of the fonts have been changed from black to gray, which makes it even worse. For the casual user, it may not be an issue, but I am online 12 hours a day. I pay a lot of money for Airtable and was perfectly happy with the old UI - I do NOT need AI.

From the reply above, it sounds like they just don’t care. It's not a matter of getting used to it; it’s a matter of being able to see my work and saving my eyesight. If they just want us to live with it, maybe I need to look around for a program I can actually see.

Oh, I just get to see their answer. Thanks for sharing ​@Valerie_Chamber! 

Ditto.  I HATE THIS.  

If AI is meant to be the primary interaction model, then I need to find a new software platform. Enshittification has come for Airtable.

​@Dan_White ​@Deborah_Whytock 

If you haven’t already, be sure to send your complaints to both of these places:

1. Send an email to support@airtable.com 
   and
2. Submit this form.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Yes, I completly agree.. I like the small AI fields when working on a formula, but would never let AI create an App or base for me.. It takes so much longer to tell AI what to exacly do then to do it ourselfs..

OMG this UI redesign is horrendous. 

Who the heck approved this?

Obviously somebody who doesn’t use it.

To be honest, I absolutely hate this new design. The changes were rolled out very unexpectedly and have significantly impacted my ability to work efficiently.

The new interface is not only uncomfortable but also highly unstructured.

The low contrast makes it incredibly difficult to distinguish between different elements — everything looks the same, which has seriously hurt the user experience. 

I have no intention of using the AI assistant while working with my databases. This feature is unnecessary for my workflow, and it feels forced into the interface at the expense of basic usability.

If you haven’t already, be sure to send your complaints to both of these places:

1. Send an email to support@airtable.com 
   and
2. Submit this form.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

I’m rarely a complainer, and I celebrate progress…. but the redesign is unusable. This isn’t just my opinion - I’ve heard from lots of our company’s users in the last few days. All negative, all confused, all asking me how to “fix” it.

I’m genuinely concerned that this will tip the scale for the decision makers in my company (who already think we should be using Monday, in spite of the fact that it can’t do many of things I use Airtable for) to pull the plug. I’ve been an Airtable evangelist for many years now - but this misstep is indefensible.

(I’ve filled out the form and sent support an email)

I just had to confirm that this user interface did not have a bug and found the answer here.  I am disappointed and can’t believe the changes.  It makes it very hard visually to use.

Hey ​@nothingbutair please make sure to submit a Product Idea form as well as to reach out to support@airtable.com to make sure your disappointment makes it to the AT team! 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

The idea that the LLM is going to become the primary way to interact with Airtable is laughable. Has anyone actually tried to use the LLM to do anything? It’s completely clueless for anything beyond extremely basic tasks like telling me how many of a category there are. I can already do that better with my eyeballs, and when I have an actual complicated task it’s useless. Get this new sidebar off of my screen. 

Reminder that two years ago they added an unminimizable thing to the left side of the interface, and there was such an uproar that they made it minimizable. 

Please note my uproar here for making this new LLM sidebar minimizable.  

We’re going to ignore you.

We think making everything look the same, and harder to distinguish, makes things less cluttered, even though it actually makes it more so.

We’re not going to change anything.

It’s like they did no user or A/B testing at all. Why would anyone opt into this design?

Ciao.

Has anyone else noticed that when in the Data Layer and you click on the Interface tab, it automatically opens in Editor mode. Trying to see if there is some toggle/menu to change this, but I have reached out to Airtable Support to ask.

THe issue is that we have some people with Creator access so they can make the odd minor modification on a Data Layer if need be, but they’ve never been trained in editing Interfaces. Now, it seems they open up straight into the Editor mode and then need to open the Interface from there. 

Not an issue if navigating directly to an Interface from the Home Screen though.

​@Cool_Kiwi Yes, that’s one of the changes they made that seems to be disrupting people’s workflows. Be sure to email your feedback to support@airtable.com, and hopefully they’ll change this back to the way it used to be. I agree with you that this should be changed back.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Thanks ​@ScottWorld, I’ve emailed Enterprise Support (hopefully faster response) and also logged a Product Idea form response.

Let’s see what they say.

I can handle (I may not like) aesthetical changes, but when functionality changes create a more difficult user experience (or even create accidental changes more easily), then this is a different story.

I see the comments about colour and contrast, I feel like this new UI wasn’t signed off by anyone with some visual disability experience… 🙄

I hate it so much. I work across multiple bases and being able to hot corner all windows and pick the full purple one is key to working efficiently between bases.

Now it just looks like an old FileMaker or a Google Sheet.

+1 to all feedback here, the pastel colors are really difficult to work with as I was using different colors for different bases and each color represented something. Now everything just looks the same and it’s really affecting my workflow since I can no longer tell which base is which across my screens on a glance. 


We went from having around 15% of the UI having a color identity, to less than 5% in the data section, and less than 1% on the automations section. There are a total of 2 very small elements with colors in the automations section so it’s incredibly hard to tell which base you are looking at now.