Improvements to expand and edit records

[Jordan_Scott1]

Hi all!

We are excited to share that as of today, we’ve made it easier for you - and your team - to expand and edit records in Airtable.

• We’re making it easier to edit records while in the expanded view. We’ve increased the area around fields (including moving the field label to the left to save vertical space) in the expanded view for each record and made improvements to the activity pane.
• We’ve also made it clear when a field is editable in expanded view so your collaborators can easily make edits.
• We’ve added a persistent action bar so that common actions like changing between records, turning on comments, and the record title all stay in the same place, even as you scroll through the details.

You can expect these updates to be reflected in your bases in the next two days. We’d love to hear feedback from you about this change, so please leave your feedback below!

[Dara_Brannan]

I am NOT a fan of this change. The expanded view is now all white without a distinction or separation between fields. Please add the boxes or some color to this view.

Icons are a must! Please add them back.
Editable field MUST have a contrasting color. No border or contrast just give me a LONG list of items and text.
Please delete the instructions telling me to start typing. This is confusing to those who do not edit records.
In most cases, I have more than 10 document attached to a record. Now, I must scroll even more to get to the information I want in the expanded view. Please make the attached documents section small again. If I want to view a document, I can expand that section.

All in all, I am NOT a fan of the changes.

[ScottWorld]

Unfortunately, I feel that this change is extremely misguided, and that it is only going to drive more people away from Airtable.

For me & several of my clients, this new design change is completely & totally unacceptable for the following reasons:

1. There are no field type icons, which is critical for distinguishing different types of fields at a glance.
2. It prompts users to start typing text for every text field, which is extremely misguided.
3. It litters the screen with hyphens to indicate calculated fields that have no data in them.
4. There are no colors or shading or any other design elements to distinguish between different parts of the screen, so everything runs together.
5. There is no easy way to distinguish which fields are editable or not.

It seems like Airtable was trying to copy Apple’s minimalist style, but Airtable paid little attention to the actual details of Apple’s style which makes interfaces easier to use instead of more difficult to use.

Airtable’s interface has traditionally been one of its biggest selling points, and Airtable has done such a good job of it in the past. But this change is a gigantic step backwards and introduces a bunch of problems that didn’t exist before.

[Cara_Van_Meter]

Dara_Brannan:

I am NOT a fan of this change. The expanded view is now all white without a distinction or separation between fields.

This is the same feedback I’m getting from my users. They don’t like it at all. And I don’t like the way it was rolled out with no warning.

Changing the whole look and feel of expanded records has a huge impact on our workflow, and a heads up would have been nice. I don’t consider a same-day post I had to go looking for in the Community Forum much of a notification – especially for something like this that literally affects every single record and field.

The issues that have been called out in previous posts are causing problems for us too:

• Lack of visual hierarchy and field delineation
• Missing field type icons – this is a HUGE miss that is going to require massive retraining
• “Start typing” and “Add a number” instructions causing major confusion
• Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling and then scrolling some more to get past fields that used to be collapsed with option to expand (particularly links and attachments)

@Jordan_Scott1 and the rest of the Airtable Team, I appreciate your intentions here, but the execution was not done well. You made a lot of assumptions and failed to communicate in advance, and your users are the ones now suffering the consequences. Please give us a way to switch back to the old view while you fine tune this one!!!

[ScottWorld]

The proper way for a company like Airtable to behave is to build trust with its customers, not continually break trust time & time again.

[Jeremy_Luebke]

Jordan_Scott1:

We’ve also made it clear when a field is editable in expanded view so your collaborators can easily make edits.

I agree with everything kuovonne said and want to add, part of the release says " * We’ve also made it clear when a field is editable in expanded view so your collaborators can easily make edits."

I would argue this release had the exact opposite effect. The form fields not having an outline is VERY annoying and poor UI. It’s like, everything is just greyed out and looks like Nothing is editable.

[kuovonne]

The field type icons are also incredibly useful when troubleshooting issues from screen captures—on this forum and, I suspect, in support calls as well.

The single dash for empty formula fields mimics the behavior of formula fields in Interfaces. I didn’t like it there and I don’t like it here. Having a dash also makes writing formula fields more confusing. A formula that outputs BLANK() should be blank, not a dash.

[Karlstens]

It’s not so much a trust thing IMHO, but rather, Airtable just had to create a pick-list of power users that can make themselves available to test these features before pushing them out live to everyone.

It’s very common practice, and I’m not too sure why they hit the go live button with these features - because with just a few weeks worth of tweaking from the feedback given, they’d then have a much smoother launch that receives nothing but praise.

Airtable could perhaps use their own product to manage their feature enhancements in a base. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

[Jeremy_John_Tho]

well, unusable for us as of today, when it all went grey.
Productivity in the toilet, and its not just because I (we’re) not used to it, its simply impossible to seee what im doing.

Its now much less obvious to the eyes, if a field has been populated or not.
Anything thats editable from where you are, should have a white box around it.

[Olpy_Acaflo]

Jordan_Scott1:

We are excited to share that as of today, we’ve made it easier for you - and your team - to expand and edit records in Airtable.

Hi @Jordan,
Hi Airtable,

Unfortunately, I’m not excited by this as it is !
Why does Airtable not first open Beta for such a UI/UX change attempt ?

Each time I got some bad experience effects like described in the latest Table Talk Topic,
I was telling myself: “OK, this is poor or bad or missing feature BUT Airtable UI/UX is top amazing, close to ideal !”
So, before to dare to alter UI/UX, please first propose a Beta of this !

Thank you if Airtable could understand that,

olπ

[ScottWorld]

@Jordan_Scott1

Airtable should hire @Andy_Lin1, because he has done in one day what $2 billion in funding at Airtable apparently couldn’t do:

Custom CSS Stylesheet for New Expanded View Show and tell

I previously started a topic on Better Whitespace Use with Custom CSS, and this is a follow-up based on the recent change to the expanded record view. tl;dr: If you have the Stylus extension/add-on for your browser*, you can grab the UserCSS file here: And you can make your expanded record view resemble the abomination seen here: [image] or the slightly less ugly version: [image] The stylesheet has several options for you to dial in the appreance that you want. Note that I’ve cobbled th…

Once again, we’re seeing the misaligned incentives of a company whose customers aren’t actually their customers, but their customers are their VC funders.

In my personal opinion, no company on the planet would have rolled out these design changes — and rolled them out so disrespectfully — if they actually depended on their customers for money.

Question: With $2 billion in the bank, why does Airtable need any customers at all? :crazy_face: