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.

[Chandan]

The recent update has made it quite difficult to locate my bases, as there is no option to sort them by the date created. This has caused significant inconvenience. I am disappointed in the team responsible for this design, as it seems they have overlooked key aspects of user interface and usability. It's crucial for those in charge of such updates to consider the end user's experience and to incorporate feedback into future improvements.

[Rachel_Penner]

"A visual refresh that focuses on increased scannability and legibility on the home screen"

What is more scannable or legible about a ton of extra boxes and lines that never existed before, plus the need to do a ton more scrolling and clicking and back and forth?

This visual "refresh" is greatly adding to the reduced functionality of this new home screen

[robscott]

Home Screen is more difficult to use, impossible to customize, and uses the wrong criteria for how we find our databases. We don't just use things according to how recently we used them. That's never been helpful and always been an unwelcome emphasis in the AT organizational paradigm. I want a way to get back to the old Home Screen, and remove all the "recently used" things or make them optional. 

[David40]

Hi @Dave_Engelberg,

Based on all the extremely concerning comments from your community and without any answer, maybe interest, from the Airtable team, here is a list of suggestions that would probably help:

1. Remove or allow to hide the "Home" page. It was useless in the previous version, it is still useless.
2. Change default landing page to "All Workspace" page.
3. On the "All Workspace" page, add an option to expend all workspaces as default.
4. Base ordering: If it is too complex to drag-drop bases and record their order, simply add a sorting by "Custom Order" and add a "Custom Order Number" in the bases parameters. Users will happily do the rest for now...
5. In the workspace views, add a numbered badge (or alternative) on each bases individually shared (for the bases shared at the base level and not the workspace level).
6. Display the Workspace for users who have access to some bases but not the entire workspaces.

Each of these points should take 5-10 minutes to code and the same to test. So a total of 1-2 hours to update a dreadful home screen that makes you lose customer and transform it in a workable tool! A fantastic deal!

PS: You can take the code lines and branches from the "Home" page, sorting by "Opened by you", "Last modified by anyone", "Shared with you" and burn them! This is pure garbage that should have not made it to the concept board, let alone the beta. It is baffling that this was pushed.

[Dave_Engelberg]

Hi all - first off, I'm sorry for the frustration that many of you are feeling with this change. Any change is going to be an adjustment, but I want you to know that we deeply value your feedback.

I first wanted to call out some additional functionality we recently launched to ensure folks were aware, as we designed it to address some of the concerns in this forum. The GIF attached shows the starred drop-down in Home, which enables users to customize their starred items on the main panel of the home screen via drag and drop. This starring supports interfaces, bases, and workspaces, and is simultaneously reflected in the left-hand nav and the Starred filter when selected.

 
I also want to emphasize that you'll continue to see more improvements on this surface over the coming quarters; moving to this new surface will enable us to focus our efforts on improving and developing more valuable features for you as we evolve as an app-building platform.

Again, we greatly appreciate both your feedback and your patience as we continue to improve this experience.

[mrsb]

For those still frustrated - this is the work around I am using.  I went in and Starred all of the boards.  This allows me to see them in the Starred section where we now have the ability to drag and drop them into any order we like.  I keep the starred section open and use the Search feature at the top and have been able to quickly and efficiently find what I need.  I hope that helps you.

To Team AirTable - just wanted to say thank you to listening to our initial concerns and adding in features that were asked for.

[David40]

Hi @Dave_Engelberg,

Thanks for your answer. A couple of comments:

1. It is wrong to assume that your customers will adjust to unrequested and poorly designed changes. Making changes that break your customer experience will make them leave, not adjust.
2. This is not frustration. This is your customers telling you that you screwed-up and highlighting what essential features in their eyes have been broken. It is a message where some willing customers try to help you retain your customer base.
3. Great to see that the Drag & Drop functionalities works. Now can we have it applied to pages that make sense (workspaces)? No one want to use a "Home" or "Favourite" page where all Workspaces and bases are mixed! This is pure madness.
4. Before focusing your efforts on improving and developing more valuable features, I would suggest you start by fixing what has been broken. Adding shinny things on top of a turd will not make your turd smell better! (the turd being you Home Screen...).

As a side note, an emergency meeting has been planned in my company early next week to discuss how we can mitigate the risk caused by this home screen while we explore alternative to change platform. Cf to point 1., I guess we are adjusting to the change after all!

[Karlstens]

I've been using the new Homescreen in tandem with creating new bases that I've had to spin up - and unfortunately my experience has been an unguided hectic mess. I treat bases like I treat files on my computer. I typically organise my files with two methods - either via placing them in a sub-directory, or, by tagging and indexing them with searchable metadata. Often I employ both methods to find and coordinate thousands of files.

When it comes to bases - and I don't have thousands of bases, I approximately have less than 100 bases all up. The fact that I can't easily navigate/manage and organise less than 100 bases (and interfaces) via the new homepage is disappointing.

I've mentioned this previously in other Homepage threads - where we've discuss desired, simple, and incremental improvements that could be made to the old homepage - please, take your lead from the like of Stardock Fences. 

• Give bases indexable, searchable properties so we can easily find bases from the Homescreen search. Consider aspects of a base that could be index, perhaps table names, Dashboard names, Scripting App names, Automation Names.
• The ability to tag bases, or give bases keywords to search by or organise with. Tags could represent clients, projects, budgets, what ever, and could visually form regions to store and display bases in.
• Sort out the workspace billing dilemma that we all face, and treat workspaces like sub-directories without billing constraints. I pay for Pro features, and this needs to evolve from having a single "Pro" workspace.
• Update the Base Icon mechanism so that the base name needn't include an emoji (and break base name alphabetical sorting)
• Starring a base shouldn't be a requirement for a manually organise bases in a HomeScreen, but rather, starring should simply act as a toggle filter, to show/hide non-starred bases.

[Bears_VN]

Please bring back the "switch to old home screen" button. I hate the new home screen, I don't care what bases I have opened in the last 30 days (it is many) I like to be able to order them so that I can quickly find what I need. 

[Zeus]

Dave, on behalf of many of us in Airtable community, I am begging the team to iterate on the new home screen faster. Or, at the very least, make the old version accessible again. This is not an update that the people wanted. It was not broken before, but now it is. Please hear us.

TLDR; The new home screen is downright dreadful and makes Airtable overwhelming.