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.

[Aristeidis_Zagk]

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

[David40]

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.

[Dave_Engelberg]

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.

[Databaser]

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 💪

[Tashina_O]

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.

[Catherine_Nelso]

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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.

[Dave_Engelberg]

@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.

[ScottWorld]

@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.

---

@Dave_Engelberg I haven't received the DM that you said you would be sending. Are you still planning on sending DM's to us? None of my clients are happy with the new home screen — as in ZERO of them — and of course, the biggest complaint is that they can no longer organize the bases in the order that they want.

It's pretty ridiculous that Airtable would assume that people would want all of their bases to be perpetually displayed in the order of most recently used to least recently used, instead of giving us the ability to arrange the bases in the order that we deem to be the right order for ourselves. 

In other words: DON'T FIX WHAT ISN'T BROKEN. We've had a much superior home screen interface for 5+ years, and now you've taken away basic core functionality that is critical to people's usage of Airtable.

Huge step backwards here. Major downgrade and lack of vision by Airtable.

Not to mention that we've been giving Airtable this advice for over 6 months. 

[SalCanz]

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. 

[coooo]

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.