Improvements to the New Home Screen

[Dave_Engelberg]

We’re excited to share that we’ll be taking our first step in rolling out the brand new home screen experience into General Availability. Thanks to your feedback, we were able to make significant improvements to the experience that will make it easier to navigate and discover the apps that matter most to you.

Benefits of the new home screen:

• A visual refresh that focuses on increased scannability and legibility on the home screen
• A focus on apps that you engage with most frequently, by promoting recently accessed apps to the top of your home screen
• The ability to star workspaces, bases, and interfaces to make them easily accessible
• A more prominent search that aggregates all content, including workspaces, bases, and interfaces
• Additional filters and sorts on the home screen, including shared with you, interface-only, and base-only filters
• A dedicated page for every workspace that enables users to pin the most critical apps for quick and easy access 

Starting March 21st, we will automatically enable the new home screen experience for all users. We will continue to allow users to revert to the old experience until late April. 

While we hope these improvements will make your experience with our home screen more useful and enjoyable, we know that change is never easy. Our team is here to support you as we make this transition. As you get started, please feel free to reach out to your account team with any questions or concerns.

[Karlstens]

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.

[Catherine_Nelso]

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..

[ScottWorld]

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

[Karlstens]

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.

[Dave_Engelberg]

@scott @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.

[ScottWorld]

@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.

This is exactly what us Airtable Consultants told Airtable about 6 months ago. A female engineer at Airtable gave us Airtable Consultants a special sneak preview of the new home screen, and most of us were not thrilled with it. All of us told her that we needed the ability to move bases & workspaces into our own desired order.

It's extremely disappointing that nobody took any of our feedback to heart.

But what's even more disappointing is that it seems like these decisions are made in complete isolation from customers, without even taking the time to understand how every single Airtable customer uses their home screen.

[Karlstens]

@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.

[Databaser]

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

[Aristeidis_Zagk]

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

[Karlstens]

@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...