This is great news, I’m looking forward to checking out these workspace changes - they’ve been very much needed!

Edit:
@Dave_Engelberg- Could you please add this workspace beta toggle to my account? I left my details in the beta feedback form, but currently can't activate the beta mode.

There needs to be either a way to go back to the old homescreen or a way to sort things not just based on time.

For many years I've had my workspaces and bases organized according to relevancy to what I am currently working on or just what is needed for the company at the time. This new layout that only lets you sort by time opened or created is heinous. Communication was much easier when all bases were viewable from one page -- now it takes multiple clicks in and out of menus. The whole point of workspaces seemed to be to group bases and be able to drag in and out, and now that workflow is utterly confused.

Please let us custom arrange workspaces or even just bases. This Starring and Pinning does not achieve the same or even similar purposes to the old home screen..

Is there no way to manually arrange bases in the new home screen? If so, then this would be a major failure.

After exploring the new Home Screen further, it became a real annoyance that I have no method of manually arranging or sorting bases by my own means - further to this, something that I'd requested previously for the homescreen is to have coloured regions that bases can be dragged and dropped into - kinda like how we drag and drop elements within an interface to group them together (and colour their region). The regions represent the category for the bases that reside within it, such as "Testing", "Non-Prod", "Production", "Running Club", "Customer A", "Customer B", etc.

We need the ability to categorise bases and group like bases by dragging them into coloured categorised regions.

@scott11 @Karlstens @Catherine_Nelso; you can set up a manual order of workspaces, bases, and interfaces in the starred menu in the left-hand nav. We don't currently support manual re-ordering of bases on the right-hand pane of the home screen. Will follow-up via DMs to discuss your use cases (but also feel free to post here) so we can make sure we're building out the best experience over time.

@Dave_Engelberg This is a real step backwards. It's not a new home screen if it takes away the #1 most important feature that people need on the home screen. Everyone needs & wants the ability to move bases & workspaces into our own desired order.

@Dave_Engelberg- I'd really appreciate a DM - although I worry I'm a little late to the personal feedback game for this particular update. I'll need to dig through my previous posts on Home Page improvement ideas too, I'm sure I've posed on these forums with ideas over the past few years - or at least gave feedback via Airtable support.

Further to starred manual sorting - the problem is that, as the starred list is the only place that I can manually sort my bases, I would have to star countless bases only then to be able to sort them - which makes the entire idea of starred bases kinda pointless - as in theory, all my bases could be starred to leverage the manual sort.

Manual sort aside (which we really, really want), another idea that might be worth considering, is the ability to sort via base colour. I could see that being useful - but realistically, I'd like to colour a region, categorise that region, and then drag my bases into that region (again, using the recent example of Interfaces and placing elements into Interface regions/zones, then applying a colour to that region/zone).

For anyone familiar with the StarDock app Fences (which manages icons on a desktop) - basically the way Fences allows for users to manage their desktop icons, is the way I'd expect Airtable to allow users to manage their bases (which are just icons) within the Home Page.

Just give us sections underneath each workspace like we have for views and automations. That would already make all the difference. 

Why does any logical person want his bases to be grouped per date??? 
Please explain one simple reason. This is so confusing and frustrating

@Dave_Engelberg- Hopefully this screenshot shows my challenge with Base Management - to summarise, there's no method for me to intuitively  manage my bases with either the old Home Screen or the new Beta Home Screen.

Do you feel overwhelmed looking at these bases? I certainly do...

@Karlstens  same for me. i just captured just a part to have a look

Hi @Dave_Engelberg,

The following essential functionalities are not existing anymore: 

1. Manual sorting of bases in a workspace. As @Karlstens mentionned, having to star workspaces/bases to be able to do so isn't the way as user would need to star everything...
2. Manual sorting of the workspace
3. Preview of who the workspace and each individual bases are shared with. In the new home page it is so difficult to control the information. Espetially if you have shared only some bases in a given workspace.

Number 1 and 3 are essential for the way we use Airtable...

I personally will never use of the "Home" page and will always go to the "All workspaces" page. The Home page doesn't add anything extra except messing up even more the workspace/base order.

Visually speaking, it looks good. I like the wider window.

Despite that, in the current situation, I will keep using the old version as the new one is not as good.

Thank you for taking the time to give your feedback on the homescreen experience. Any major change to a tool you use daily has the potential to cause frustration, but it’s clear that this change specifically has taken away things that you rely on like manual sorts and ordering.  We hear your feedback on this and are discussing these high priority fixes with our engineering team. While this doesn’t change your current frustration, I want to emphasize that this version of the home screen isn’t where we’ll stop, but instead a new starting point. With this first step, we’ve been focused on improving load times and, most importantly, creating a simplified information architecture that will allow us to build more functionality into the home screen that wouldn’t have been possible on the old foundation.

I also wanted to provide some context for some of the decisions we’ve made thus far. We decided to redesign our homescreen specifically because we’ve gotten feedback from all types of users, from those that have been using Airtable for years, to those that just started a few months ago, that our homescreen included irrelevant content and got extremely crowded, extremely quickly once you started building your workflows in Airtable. While we do want to solve this painpoint for new users who often come into a company’s Airtable workspace and quickly feel overwhelmed, we also heard a ton of feedback in our research sessions and usability testing that many of our longstanding users had to do a lot of handholding as they shared Airtable with teammates or got a client set up in Airtable. In this first update, we wanted to try to make that onboarding process clearer, which is why we prioritized starring as a low-effort way to start keeping track of content that matters to you, as well as recency and improved navigation/wayfinding that is focused on apps instead of workspaces.  

While it’s clear some of the patterns we included have been frustrating and disrupted your workflows, I do think that there are improvements in this update that are particularly useful like  pinning key apps in workspaces, a more discoverable search UI, and navigation via the left-hand navigation. 

Our team is focused on shipping new product quickly, and striking the balance between getting these updates out in the world and learning from them so we can iterate but perfecting the experience before product is shipped is always hard for a product manager to balance. In this case, it’s clear that some of the experience is a miss for our power users and that’s feedback I am taking to the team as we map out our next few sprint cycles. We’re going to continue making improvements and I hope you’ll continue to provide feedback. Thank you again for your patience and clear feedback, please know it’s not falling on deaf ears.

Thank you for elaborating on this @Dave_Engelberg. As many of us long time users already pointed out on many occasions: start with "why" and not with "what" you're changing. This kind of context and the assurance that it isn't a stop point, but a starting point, could save you a lot of worrying customers. 

I'm looking forward to these futur improvements 💪

I hate everything about this, it is overwhelming with irrelevant and clunky information. The ability to customize how things are ordered is essential and having to click 5 or 6 times to actually view everything is poor UI design. This entire new home page is a giant step backwards and useless.

Unfortunately this starring and pinning system does not group things in their previous categories which, as others have pointed out, makes finding workspaces/bases and who is shared to which, much more illegible. It now takes several clicks to find something that was once one.

With the new system we are basically having to recreate a hollow shell of the old home page in the new sidebar in its entirety, using the small amount of manual sorting available in order to achieve a semblance of the categorization offered by the usual homepage screen. With lots of bases and workspaces, that's quite a lot to ask, and it's not even nearly as functional, both with regards to access to information on each element as well as just size-wise the nav bar being tiny. It will be difficult to find the time to do that and have to also spread the same information across multiple teams... and every single time somebody is onboarded... How very overwhelming, to be honest. Not easy to solve over a phone call.

The number one best function of the usual homepage was its ability to custom sort and drag things where they needed to be. It was unique in a landscape of similar products all doing the same thing. The second best was easily being able to get an idea of who or how many people had access to what (workspace, base, etc) with just a glance. This made it easy when giving various access to large amounts of people. Now these things are impossible to with such ease.

As well, this dating system with the current homepage seems to be broken. Bases I've opened days or weeks ago are listed as months ago and do not filter to the top. The sorting is random and therefor useless.

It also seems there is no obvious way to revert back to the old homepage, even though that's stated in the original post. If anybody knows how to get back, even for just a time, please let me know.

I appreciate that you yourself are not the only person at AirTable but just somebody doing their best and we are all unloading our frustrations on this thread. I just really have to say that this is core functionality that has been impacted for many.

@Dave_Engelberg wrote:

Mar 13, 2023 05:33 PM

you can set up a manual order of workspaces, bases, and interfaces in the starred menu in the left-hand nav. We don't currently support manual re-ordering of bases on the right-hand pane of the home screen. Will follow-up via DMs to discuss your use cases (but also feel free to post here) so we can make sure we're building out the best experience over time.

 

 

@Catherine_Nelso - thanks for the thoughtful feedback; I wanted to quickly call out where the ability is to revert to the old experience. I've attached a quick screenshot, and you can also find the details on this here.

I have the same frustrations as others here. I kept my bases grouped and color coded. I liked being able to drag them to regroup. It's cumbersome to (sort of) recreate that in the left column using stars.

About the only workaround I can see at this point is to come up with some group abbreviation (e.g., PDB for Personal Data Bases) and put that at the start of each base title. Or a letter code for the color of the base (like BB for Bright Blue). Or numbers. Then the alphabetizing of bases will  group them.  But it would be much easier to manually group. Or at least be able to sort by color. 

As many have already pointed out, it is a terrible step backwards in Airtable to go from being able to manually place icons to just automatically arranging them based on recent use.

I am surprised that your UX team made such a bad decision and am concerned about future changes. Unfortunately, I found it doubtful that you guys have used Airtable yourselves.

Please, please listen to your users.

Until the new interface supports the functionality of the old one, please allow us to continue to use the old one.

This new home screen is terrible!  I can't find the things I need and now the order I want them in is gone too.  When active and inactive projects used to be sorted by me are now all mixed together you have given me more work instead of making my workflow easier.  PLEASE give me a way to go back to the old home screen. 

Thanks, I hate it.

I need to be able to manually arrange my bases.

I need to be able to separate interfaces and bases but still see both on one page. They look identical currently and the only way to separate is to choose "Interfaces only".

Every time I go to a base and come back to the home screen my view choice has gone back to 'Opened by you' sort, when I prefer (lesser of 3 evils) to sort Alphabetically (which by the way- every time I also have to change it from Z-A to A-Z).

Trying to find anything in a workspace is absolute chaos.

Listen to your customers. We hate it.

Thanks but no thanks

I switched back to the old Home Screen. Better than the new, but still missing a couple of things. 

Guys when you lunch something new, it must fill all the "holes" of the old one. Not create more problems. 

It's also worth noting that the "Alphabetically" sort method doesn't work as desired, as it does not take into account that many base names may contain an emoji for their first letter, a feature that is heavily used that allows for the Base Icon to be an emoticon.

As a side note - this "hacky" emoji base icon feature has been a pain for all time. Users should be able to apply an icon to a base independently of the name - and now with the Home Page being revised, we see bugs like this play out - where I can't even sort my hundred bases alphabetically, as the sort trips over any base where an emoji is used as the first character in the base name.

Hi all,

First off, we wanted to take a moment to express our gratitude for your valuable feedback on the recent home screen changes. We understand that for some of you, this update has been frustrating and has made navigating Airtable more challenging. 

As we’ve noted in earlier posts, we will continue to iterate on the new home screen. In light of your feedback, we've decided to extend the availability of the old home screen while we work on refining the new experience, especially around areas like custom ordering and workspace navigation.

As we work on these improvements, we'll be sure to keep you informed with updates along the way. Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for being part of the Airtable community!