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Calling All Airtable Enthusiasts: We want your feedback!

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MaddieJ
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hey Airtable Community! 

I’ve been your Community Manager for a couple of months now and I’ve loved getting familiar with the space, and seeing what gets you excited about Airtable. As we continue to shape the Airtable Community, we want to hear from you. This is your community, and we want your voices to be heard as we think about ways to improve the overall experience, and scope programs for you to participate in. 

 

What we’re looking for

We want to hear your ideas for community programming and improvements. This can encompass a wide range of topics, such as:

  • Feature Requests: Is there a community feature you've been wishing for? Share your ideas for how we can improve the community functionality and help you work more efficiently.
  • Learning Resources: Do you have suggestions for new tutorials, guides, or educational content that would help you master Airtable? Let us know!
  • Community Engagement: How can we foster better connections within the Airtable community? Share ideas on events, groups, challenges, or initiatives you'd like to see.
  • Improving Accessibility: If there are barriers to using the community that you've encountered, we're eager to address them and make the platform more accessible to all.

 

How to Share Your Feedback

In order to best review your feedback, we’re asking that all ideas please be submitted through our community feedback form. (For some of our Community OG’s, this form may look familiar! 🙂)

Your feedback and ideas will be carefully reviewed by our team to see how they align with our goals of making the community even more user-friendly, powerful, and engaging. Keep in mind that while we may reach out to some of you for additional insight on your feedback, every submission may not receive a response. 

I also want to acknowledge the effort it takes to submit feedback, so I thank you all in advance for any energy you put towards this.

 

Onward!

It’s clear how passionate this community is about Airtable, and it’s because of each of you that this space has been brought to life. I can’t wait to get creative and improve the experience with your input in mind.

 

21 Comments
ScottWorld
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Thanks for being a great Community Manager, @MaddieJ🤗

I am going to fill out the form right now with the information listed below, but I just wanted to publicly share that my main issues are technical in nature:

1. The community forums do not work properly on Safari for Mac. Many of the dropdown menus do not work properly on Safari — "Subscribe" and "Unsubscribe" are the 2 big ones, but several of the other ones do not work either. The workaround is to just use Chrome for Mac instead, but Safari is the default web browser on the Mac, so it would be cool if the forums worked with Safari.

2. It would be great if we could use markdown text when creating posts. Currently, it is extremely tedious to hyperlink the text in our posts, because we have to stop typing, highlight the words, click on the link button (or press command-K/control-K) to bring up a dialog box, paste in the URL into the dialog box, then close the dialog box. In the old Discourse-based forums, we could just type markdown text like this: [text](link)

ScottWorld
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Thanks for being a great Community Manager, @MaddieJ🤗

I am going to fill out the form right now with the information listed below, but I just wanted to publicly share that my main issues are technical in nature:

1. The community forums do not work properly on Safari for Mac. Many of the dropdown menus do not work properly on Safari — "Subscribe" and "Unsubscribe" are the 2 big ones, but several of the other ones do not work either. The workaround is to just use Chrome for Mac instead, but Safari is the default web browser on the Mac, so it would be cool if the forums worked with Safari.

2. It would be great if we could use markdown text when creating posts. Currently, it is extremely tedious to hyperlink the text in our posts, because we have to stop typing, highlight the words, click on the link button (or press command-K/control-K) to bring up a dialog box, paste in the URL into the dialog box, then close the dialog box. In the old Discourse-based forums, we could just type markdown text like this: [text](link)

ScottWorld
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Oops, didn't mean to post that twice, but it isn't giving me a delete option! 😝

MaddieJ
Community Manager
Community Manager

Noted, and I'll also take the feedback about deleting posts. Thanks Scott!

kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Thank you for your interest in feedback. 

 

First, let me say that I am posting from my phone and the mobile experience is horrible. I can see very little. I cannot format code. I cannot quote. Sometimes I can see only three to five lines of a very narrow column of text. 

I also have a lot of feedbsck fatigue from Scott and me providing a lot of feedback earlier and seeing very little changes. 

I also don't like having the feedback from people hidden in a private base. I think it is better if people can see what feedback other people provide. Maybe you could make a public shared view of entries? Users filling out the form could choose if their feedback is public or not. 

MaddieJ
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hey @kuovonne, thanks for sharing your thoughts! I completely understand your feedback fatigue as I know you’ve submitted quite a bit in the past. I’ll log your items listed here in our feedback base so I can investigate. 

FWIW, I’m posting this comment from my phone as well to check out the mobile experience. If you’re willing, feel free to share more details about what you’re seeing through the feedback form so we can collect any screenshots and browser information to properly address. And note that I’m going to be doing a heavier audit of the mobile experience overall so I’ll probably find some of the things you’ve seen 🙂

Last, I want to note that the feedback form submissions are going to remain private for now but I hear your desire for more transparency. Ideally as folks submit their feedback, I’ll be able to address suggestions as we implement improvements. 

Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

*cough* Bring back Discourse *cough*

I'd appreciate if we could seem some positive action within the Product Ideas, including feedback of whether an idea is in the works, or if it's being rejected then a reason as to why. 

https://community.airtable.com/t5/product-ideas/idb-p/productideas

kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

@MaddieJ Thanks for the reply. I almost didn’t see it. For some reason, I decided to check my notification feed, which I normally never do because it is usually full of stuff that I don’t care about. Anyway, I saw that you replied in my notification feed and decided to check out the thread. 

I doubt that I will be filling out the form. I’m sorry that you have to deal with that. I’ve thought about it, but if Airtable is committed to keeping Khoros, I just don’t see filling out the same form with the same info as before being worthwhile. I’m usually on my phone when interacting with this community. Taking screenshots and filling out a form on my phone is too much friction when I have little hope of things getting better with Khoros. 

Thanks for doing an audit of the mobile experience. Please include the following (off the top of my head, I’m probably missing stuff)

- typing code for formulas

- quoting previous posts

- viewing screenshot links

- typing replies with formula code while also viewing screnshots to try to type matching field names

- reading unformatted scripts posted by people where lines wrap much sooner than on desktop

- reading properly formatted code on a narrow mobile screen

- searching for replies made several years ago where you only know the poster name and maybe a keyword

- having ongoing conversations on multiple threads

For what it’s worth, I upgraded from an iPhone 6s earlier this year to an iPhone SE. But the screen size is the same. I use the default system browser.

kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

IMG_0977.png

 

IMG_0976.png

Here are some screenshots showing what I mean about only seeing a few lines of text when typing a reply.

kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

When I went back to my notification feed to try to find this thread to post the screenshot, the page said that I had no notifications. So I almost didn't bother. Then I decided to try reloading the page and the historic notifications showed up again and I had to scroll past the equivalent of two screens before I found the notification for this thread to get the link to this thread. It wasn’t two screens worth of content because the header is huge and not really content. 

And while I’m here, I still have to click the “login” button every time I visit this community.