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.

[Kannan]

I stumbled upon a solution to tackle the frustration caused by AirTable's new Home Screen. Instead of cluttering my sidebar with countless favorited bases (I had over 50!), I adopted a different approach, and here's how my experience unfolded:

1. I decided to organize my workspace alphabetically, making it easier to access the specific workspace I needed.
2. Replacing emojis with simple icons became necessary to prevent any sorting mishaps.
3. I opted to rename each base with alphabet codes (e.g., A. Group1-base1, A. Group1-base2, B. Group2-base1) preserving my custom groupings and making base names resemble bullet points while maintaining readability.
4. To quickly identify my groups, I assigned distinct colors to each one.
5. Unexpectedly, I found myself rarely using the Home Screen anymore. Instead, I relied on shortcuts (⌘ + K on Mac) to seamlessly navigate between bases, akin to using Spotlight for AirTable.

As a bonus, this approach safeguarded my groupings, regardless of any future UI changes.

Farewell, Home Screen! I hope this helps someone!

[Karlstens]

@Kannan- you might want to take note of this XKCD...

Workflow 

(Remember to mouse hover for the ALT text...)

[Zeus]

Hey everyone, I made a quick video on what I did to get around Airtable's confusing new home screen. 

I rarely have to use the home screen after this - https://youtu.be/J9WbGK-q2jA

[robscott]

LOL love it how people are just basically posting workarounds. We did a similar thing to Kannan above, renaming our databases using a numbering conventions like "01 Clients" "02 Events Management" etc, so we can just organize A->Z and they appear in the order we want them. 

At some point airtable enterprise team asked us whether we needed any help and we said "Yeah, we used to be able to organize our databases and now we're forced to deal with 'most recently opened' or 'alphabetical' and we want a better system" and they just replied that we could star our favorites. 

Great! A product that launched on flexibility and usability has a binary solution to organizing whole databases! What silliness.

[foleyartist1]

Please implement a way to sort bases other than just oldest <> newest, such as alphabetical. The home screen experience is much less friendly now that things move locations on the screen based on when I've accessed them, and there is no way to turn that off.

[Heidi_Anderson1]

There are so many threads in community & these comments so I have selected this one for this time. It's been months since the forced new Home Screen that clearly many, many prolific Airtable users do not want. @Dave_Engelberg -this is the difference between what tools people use and how. New features in Airtable are making the Home Screen experience even worse.

Example: Interfaces are great to embrace and useless to manage at the new Home Screen without one of the many workarounds noted. "Show interfaces only" provides no context unless a strict naming convention is employed and enforced.

It is unclear what possible architecture limitation there could be to always allow either Home Screen. However, if you want data-driven decisions, I strongly suggest providing an option for us to use either Home Screen. I do believe that discovery was done prior to the change but from my experience many do not do discovery well. That makes or breaks customer relations, products, profits, and companies.

Good architecture process and customer service aside, my opinion is that the Home Screen should have progressed, following that of phone and tablets allowing simple custom grouping and continued free flow placement. The current Home Screen reverts back over a decade to the nearly lowest-level file management, and worse considering file management at least provides folders.

I implore you to listen to your customers and revisit this critical gateway to the Airtable experience!

[Databaser]

The new Home Screen is a NIGHTMARE for new users. I get asked constantly "where is base x or interface y?". I cannot understand why Airtable is always so slow and reluctant to improve these kind of *** changes that no one asked for... I know Enterprise clients are all that matter, but surely even they can't be happy with this?