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.

[Dave_Engelberg]

Hi all,

I wanted to reach out to this thread with some exciting news (@karlstens you beat me to the punch); we’re in the process of rolling out the first improvement since debuting the updated home screen experience (we're at 1% as of this evening, expanding to 100% over the next two weeks). Based on a lot of feedback from the community, our first set of improvements include:

• A static “Starred” full-screen experience: Based on many comments from this forum, we heard that users - especially those with a lot of workspaces and bases - needed a static home screen that they could customize. We’ve introduced that experience as a new filter on the home screen, and introduced a dedicated workspace tile and drag/drop functionality as well. You can find that filter in the same toggle as “Opened by You” and “Shared with you” - see screenshot at the bottom of this post.
• Visual updates on tiles: We also heard a lot of feedback that timestamps on when you last opened an app as tile metadata wasn’t useful. Instead, we’ll be updating tiles to reflect where an interface or base lives.
• Additional usability improvements: filters are now “sticky” and remember filter settings in workspaces. We’ve also made a number of bug fixes and usability improvements around navigation when returning to the home screen and better organization of workspaces.

I also wanted to update this group that we will be removing the opt-out on July 12th (also per an email you may have received). I want to make sure that you are aware of this upcoming deadline in case you need to update your workflows so you can take action to mitigate any potential disruption. 

While we hope these improvements will make your experience with our home screen more useful and enjoyable, we recognize this will be a challenging change for some. As I hope this initial update demonstrates, we’ll continue to improve and iterate on this new surface over time, so please keep the feedback coming.

[Karlstens]

Thanks for the update @Dave_Engelberg  - is there any way for us to see "Bases Shared By You", where the owner of a workspace has created a base, and shared it with others?

[Dave_Engelberg]

Hey @Karlstens - I interpret your question as: User Kelly creates Workspace "Marketing Workflow" and shares that workspace with Users Scott and Akshay. In that workspace there are multiple bases; would those bases show up in the "Shared with you" filter?

The answer to that question (lmk if I'm not understanding) is that the workspace will show up in your All Workspaces page, but we won't show all bases in that workspace in the "Shared with you" filter. The rationale is that we didn't want to flood "Shared with you" if someone shared a workspace with many bases within it. 

[Karlstens]

Yah, I was hoping an "Shared with Others" filter options would be available, to show the bases that I've authored, and then shared with others.

[David40]

**Urgent update needed**

Hi @Dave_Engelberg,

The mandatory use the new home page turned out to be catastrophic! I had tested it as an admin and this wasn't good due to all comments mentionned earlier in this thread. But I hadn't tested it as a user... This turned out to be a huge mistake on my side.

We are using multiple Workspaces. Our users have access to some bases in each workspace, depending on their role. In the new interface, as they don't have access to the full workspaces, the Workspaces do not appear in the Workspaces list. Bases are therefore only available in the unfriendly "Home" section where all the workspaces are mixed together. This is unusable...

Can we please have an urgent update for this? This prevent us to use Airtable and we might have to urgently move to a different plateform if this is not fixed...

Thanks,

David

[Tashina_O]

This is still homepage is still trash in every conceivable way. The "changes" you made with our feedback from this thread are not useful. Return the old homepage and actually LISTEN to the feedback given.

[Britany_Felix]

I'm SO GLAD I'm not the only one who absolutely hates this update. It's the worst UI update I think I've ever seen from any product or service. The organization makes absolutely zero sense, the little starred box is tiny, the starred screen you're so proud of in this update isTERRIBLE (everything is lumped together rather than being grouped by workspace and it's a huge pain to drag and drop because everything keeps shifting every single time), everything is way more cluttered looking than it was before with these useless tiles instead of just the icons, and you to have scroll more or click extra buttons just to access the same things bases in a workspace.

Whoever designed this and whoever approved it should no longer be in their current roles because they're clearly awful at their jobs.

I've been using Airtable since at least 2016, and I'm starting the research today to find a new platform to move everything to.

[Islah92]

Hello,
I find this new home screen awful.
I did my best to keep the old home screen until you made it mandatory for us to switch to. 

Here's why : 

1) The default setting mixes up the bases from all the workspaces, and even the "free plan" and the "pro plan" workspaces ... It's messed up.
If I want to display a particular workspace so that I have a global view of ALL MY BASES, in it I have to :
1) go the side bar 2) choose my workspace 3) set the order to "alphabetical" so that I don't have to scroll th whole page 4) it's only after all these movements that I can have a kind of global view of all my bases ... from one workspace only ! 

2) Why don't I have the possibility to sort my bases the way  I want, by a simple drag and drop like before, instead of forcing me to class them alphabetically or by "last modified" ???????? 

3) Why are the interfaces not separated from the bases  ??? Could I at least have the possibility to choose this setup  instead of your forcing me to mix up my bases and my interfaces ??? 

4) Last but not least : among all this mess (sorry), we don't even have the possibility to rearrange the workspace the best we could with the limited possibilites you give to us ... Because the homescreen goes back to the default setting (sorted by "last modified", workspaces mixed up ...) every time we refresh the page. 

5) EMERGENCY EDIT : UNBELIEVABLE. The alphabetical sorting (less of three evils) doesn't even work since it takes into account the emoji used as an icon of the base ... This homescreen is the joke of the century
I'm sorry but just for this, you should allow your customers to go backt to the old home screen, again. Its is not okay to provide your customers with a less-than-beta version of a homescreen @Dave_Engelberg 

Please Airtable, could we at least have the two possibilities ? One "non global" homescreen and one "global" homescreen, like the old one,  with a global view of all our bases, separated by workspaces, themselves separated between the interfaces and the bases, and the possibility to sort the bases like we want ?


This homescreen is awful, not user-friendly,  and I don't even want to think of my colleagues who will discover it the next days. 

[Karlstens]

Yah, it has to be said, that the emoji-first-letter-base-name-hack is god awful. Each base should be given the option of a base image either via an icon (and whilst we're talking icons, the existing available icon selection needs to be bumped significantly) OR emoji, and then a normal string text name.

Because now we have the classic issue of not being able to sort bases via base name correctly, because of this hack-job, which I admit, sure, was great 8 years ago... but we've definitely out grown this and it needs to be addressed with all other newly introduced Home Page issues.

[carriepmcfo]

The new home page is TERRIBLE!!! I want to see all bases and not just ones I've opened. Until yesterday, I was able to switch it back to the old experience and now that capability is gone. All of our workspace collaborators are missing in the new experience, save one or two. When I switched back to the old experience yesterday, they were there and functioning and now today, it's back to the same horrendous home page and workspace collabs are missing again. Even though people are base collaborators, they still can't access the bases.