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!

[Bill_French]

This thread started with some excitement and the promise of a better product but has sadly acted as a lightning rod for dissatisfaction and there’s no end in sight.

In the feedback data thus far I have gleaned… (~ means approx BTW)

• ~21% appear to believe there are some positive aspects to this change.
• ~87% appear to hate the change.
• ~60% appear to hate this change for more than one reason.
• ~25% believe this change was a significant step backwards.
• ~52% have provided some helpful alternative approaches and augmentations.
• ~36% are prepared to become former customers because of this change.

And all of this unhappiness, customer dissatisfaction, and business-dependent disruption could have been entirely avoided while also gathering this data and much more.

[ScottWorld]

I’ve worked in the software industry my entire life — ever since I was 12 years old — and I have never experienced a company that acts like this.

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

I’ve worked in the software industry my entire life — ever since I was 12 years old

When I was 12, all I had to play with was a stick. The term “software” wouldn’t have been invented for another 8 years. :winking_face:

ScottWorld:

I have never experienced a company that acts like this.

I have; you’ve been lucky. In the grand scheme of the software industry mistakes like this are pretty common. In the march from adolescence to mature technologies, the ones that are hyper-successful typically advance their platforms rapidly by recognizing that the product is the survey - no forms, no feedback discussions; just user analytics where customers vote with behaviors.

Airtable is a very modern UX company that has not apparently realized the power of subliminal real-time analytics.

When was the last time Apple had to broadcast an email about an iOS change or faced this kind of community backlash? :thinking_face: The product is the survey. It requires no forms or excessive and complicated human conversations - just a little exercising by users and behind the scenes the data collected should make it really obvious where the developers need to spend a little more time.

[Lynda_Albertson]

Any word from Dev on all the negative comments here? Any hope of us returning to something that is easier to view or to fix the glitches outlined?

[Margaret_Picker]

Does anyone know how to take issues up the line at Airtable? Is anyone who is unhappy an Enterprise User? Or, well known at Airtable? Who is their head of development? I really want a reversal and quick.

[kuovonne]

Margaret_Pickering:

Does anyone know how to take issues up the line at Airtable?

Here are the main methods of providing feedback on this issue:

• Post to this thread. It is being read by Airtable, even if you do not see many posts by them. (Not all threads are read by Airtable, but ones like this are.)
• Contact support.
• If you have an enterprise account, talk with your account manager.

Margaret_Pickering:

I really want a reversal and quick.

So do many other users. However, Airtable has historically decided on their own timetable on making changes. Some changes that are clearly bugs get resolved very quickly. Other changes take weeks to redesign and implement. Yet other issues have never been addressed. I suspect that Airtable’s UX/UI designers are already back at the drawing board for this particular issue, but we may not know when/if there will be changes until Airtable releases them.

[ScottWorld]

Margaret_Pickering:

Does anyone know how to take issues up the line at Airtable?

Historically, Airtable has not valued customer feedback, which has been the most frustrating part for me about using Airtable.

As @kuovonne mentioned above, we only have 3 options: (1) this one thread that we’re posting in now, (2) enterprise users can contact their account manager, or (3) contacting support.

To contact support, you can send an email to support@airtable.com.

[Karlstens]

Yah, I’ve reached out to support just now to show my support for user feedback and testing of such enhancements. I’m hoping they’ll be revisiting this due to the amount of community feedback within this thread alone.

[Alec1]

Came here looking for this, was pretty upset to see what was a pretty decent layout turn into something that just looks… off. I agree with all the other complaints. The main thing for me is the off-center fields, I can see this working for most types, but for long text, where you have multiple lines of text, you end up with a massive empty space on the left, and it being aligned to the right like that just looks wrong.

Also, there’s too much white space in general, which is what makes it not work that well for even the other field types. It looks about 3x wider on average than it needs to be. Even for the longer label names it’s still more than twice as wide as it needs to be. At least make it dynamic, so that the space is adjusted based on the longest field.

Attachments also look really weird with the massive white space to the left. Maybe make some of the fields centered?

The other thing is how it all blends together… which is probably why it looks so bad. Adding a ton of white space while at the same time removing the borders and moving the labels to the left so that it all blends together, it makes it much harder on the eyes. Also is the label text smaller too? It’s like all the decisions were made with the goal of making it as hard as possible to look at.

An ideal solution would be to restore the borders or add some other form of separation (the borders could maybe stay gone if the labels were above the fields (and were larger/bold again), since those can act as separators), and then allow users to choose if they want labels to appear to the side or above, and have dynamic spacing if they’re positioned to the left.

I get it, there’s always going to be people who dislike any UI changes. I’m pretty sure there’s been changes in the past I thought were bad, but I could live with it, however this one I dislike so much that I feel compelled to post here. Not that I expect anything to change, if pretty much every other software company is anything to go by when it comes to abrupt UI changes that no one asked for, it’ll either stay the same or get worse, but… worth a shot.

[Rebecca_Elam]

I seem to be back to the old interface, for that I thank you. Not sure if this is across the board or I’m finally on a cool list lol.