Introducing new ways to harness the power of AI, build apps, and connect data

[Stephanie_Sosa]

👋Hi all! I’m Stephanie, product marketer at Airtable and I'm so excited to introduce some powerful new features to help teams build AI-powered apps on top of shared data—all within a single, scalable platform.

Today, we’re bringing AI to Airtable, making Airtable the easiest and fastest way to deploy AI-powered applications across the enterprise. We're also releasing new features to empower teams to get up and running and build powerful apps quickly with a suite of pre-built applications for marketing and product teams. 

• Apps by Airtable: Get set up and running faster than ever with out-of-the-box apps built for critical use cases. Available for Enterprise.
• Verified data: Easily protect and manage your org’s most important data from one place, while making it accessible to those who need it most. Available for Enterprise.
• Two-way sync: Automatically sync data and edits back and forth between workflows so your teams can easily collaborate on the most up-to-date information. Available for Enterprise.

We’re rolling these updates out over the next week; if you don’t see them reflected in your workspace, hold tight! 

But something I’m super excited to announce is a new left navigation in Interface Designer. Now, we’re making it easier for you to quickly find and engage with the most important parts of their workflows. In addition to the updates we released back in March, Interface Designer makes it that much easier to build on Airtable. (And spoiler alert: we’re not done. Stay tuned for even more exciting updates to the app building experience)

Left Navigation: New left navigation panel for easy navigation between interfaces & pages.

But that’s not all, you’ll also see that we cleaned up the share view menu so that your teams can discover and share important views and data across the org.

Redesigned Share View Menu: Simplified sharing and syncing with a redesigned share view dialog.

These features will be a game changer for teams of all sizes—helping them build the apps they need on a scalable, secure platform. Learn more about these updates in our blog post!

We can’t wait to hear what you think, and see what you build, with these updates!

[Zach_Young1]

I do like the headspace the side nav offers... that feels so much better... I kinda knew that was an issue before, but wow, thank you!

And if it could collapse too, that'd be great. I do notice that it's resizable, so not too bad already.

[kuovonne]

> First, I want to share bit more context for how we landed on this new design:

@Shannon_Anahata Thank you for coming to post your point of view.

> We have heard from customers that navigating between interfaces was so buried

I can totally believe that you had large enterprise customers providing you with this feedback. However, the problem was that you listened to the issues of a small subset of customers and crafted a solution for them without taking into account the ramifications on everyone else. The left-side-interface-navigation-pane works beautifully for the use case you are describing. But it doesn't work for a lot of other people for all the reasons listed in this thread.

Airtable has a broad and varied user base.  But the impression from the outside is that Airtable listens to a handful of large enterprise customers and builds what those few customers want, without much regard for the impact on everyone else. Sometimes the "little guys" suddenly get updates that break their systems because the changes were designed for a different type of user. Sometimes the little guys just hear about nifty features that they desperately want (increased record limits, two-way sync, etc.) but cannot get because those features are restricted to enterprise.

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> Second, we hear you on pricing and packaging! The good news is that we're actively working on updating our plans to better enable customers to get access to enterprise features...so stay tuned in the coming months for updates 

@Stephanie_Sosa Thank you for letting us know that you are actively working on this. I totally get that it is a thorny issue with deep engineering and financial repercussions. I remember Airtable representatives saying as much at the last DareTable conference over a year ago. As much as I wish that you would run ideas past a focus group of consultants, I also understand that talking with external people about pricing is even harder to do than talking about other features.

[Brisbane_Roadru]

Unable to find the option to Toggle "Stop Accepting New Responses" on and off on the new redesigned form share view menu.

[Eric_McFetridge]

@Shannon_Anahata we appreciate the response. I hope you all understand that, despite the overwhelmingly negative feedback in this thread, if the new left nav panel was optional, we would all love it. There are definitely use cases where it is the better choice in an interface design. The fact that it is not optional, and being dropped on us so quickly, turns it into a catastrophe. I want to be very clear that in many use cases (see: mobile), this new nav panel isn't just an annoyance, it makes using Airtable interfaces impossible, with no work-around.

Interface Designer was a gamechanger for Airtable. I think it is possible Airtable is somewhat unaware of just how good their product is and how creative their users are. In my organization's case, the systems we have managed to put in place are drastically better than off-the-shelf subscription solutions that literally cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Please, like many others in this thread, I beg you guys to reconsider the scheduling of this push. Many of us have poured our hearts into our Airtable solutions, and decisions like this can completely blow up what Interface Designer has enabled us to do. The "trust us, it's going to get better" dialog does not appease my immediate concerns.

Interface Designer is amazing but it is best when we can design the interface.

[Jean_Thoensen]

The left navigation for interfaces is a disaster for low vision users. Some users lower their screen resolution below the recommend level for their graphics card and zoom in their browser windows. Our production interface layout accommodates this. The left navigation blew that up completely, rendering our interface unusable for these people. Please expedite the ability to collapse the left navigation.

[Erin_Keeffe]

@Shannon_Anahata thank you for responding here! As a sign of good faith could you try to at least delay the full sidebar rollout until it has been updated to be collapsible?

As a product designer of over 12 years I have seen multiple times how businesses focusing only on their few enterprise customers and forgetting about their many other customers has ruined entire products/businesses. Please don’t be tempted to go down this path. We don’t need another Asana competitor, but we desperately need affordable/usable software solutions for small businesses.

[Meredith_Scrog1]

Hi @Shannon_Anahata, thank you fo the post, but I don't think it really addresses the root of the problem that is evident in this thread and festering around the Airtable community.

If the goal is to make it so that anyone can use the apps, then why release this if user feedback might have suggested that it was not properly usable? I think Airtable so often forgets how many types of users they're working with because Airtable, and especially Interfaces, is incredible for connecting the not your average techy employee with powerful data. I was excited for Interfaces so that we could continue to excite our teams with powerful ways to use and edit data in a more user-friendly way because Airtable can be intimidating, especially when we are using it to "connect important business processes and build more powerful applications." I understand that sure, overall improving navigation would be beneficial, but without knowing how navigation should be improved and just that it should be improved, what is the benefit of releasing a product update? Navigation/UI has now taken two step back to be weaker and has frustrated the end users you're speaking about to now not want to use Interfaces.

I have to imagine that the majority of companies and teams that use Airtable are not in the tech world and like many of us, opted for Airtable because it was a great way to connect data with our business operations in a user-friendly way. When systems managers have no idea that are updates are coming and have to scurry to make provisions as to not disrupt day-to-day business, that indicates being very out of touch with how customers/users are using the product. Our teams and clients are not as concerned about roadmaps or updates down the road - they want a tool that helps them get their job efficiently and doesn't want to hear that it "should" be coming soon if the tool is rendered useless for them today.

[TDY]

Here's my recommendation:

1. Delay rollout of the interface to Editors until interface change is optional .

If you can do this and quickly confirm it for everyone, you'll calm 90% of the anxiety and get back enough goodwill from demonstrating you are listening to users.

2. Understand the critical points made in the commentary here.

"You don't know how powerful what you have is."

"You don't understand how people are creatively flocking to this."

3. Harness this moment.

Don't  roll it out to Editors until it's an optional feature. Make sure it's OFF by default and use this as an opportunity to inject some real coherence and competence into your change management process.

Take the opportunity to find out how these smaller clients are using your product because that's where you are going to find the evangelists suddenly in love with the fact you're listening to them.

And they are the ones who are up all night breaking themselves to figure out new applications for their clients, which is the type of innovation concatenation you want.

[Karlstens]

Although feature-fixing the new Interface sidebar is a step forward - what we're needing here is for Airtable to understand that their system is production (!!!). Users need an opt-in toggle so that they can pace the update at their own time, or otherwise ignore it whilst they focus on their day-to-day work. But enough has been said about this problem, and at least it's getting addressed (even though I still want to access the old UI layout, and not just collapse the new side window!)

What I'm really bugged about, is the new Two Way Sync feature being limited to Enterprise only. It's disrespectful to Pro Subscribers, consultants who propagate Airtable into businesses, who should at least have access to this feature. Even if the feature were limited in scope to a base cap limit, at least give us the means to try it, talk about it with our customers, etc.

Why were pro users rejected from accessing this much anticipated feature?

[Grunty]

Hi @Shannon_Anahata,
Thanks for the informative post. It appears you were commissioned to offer your chest to the bullets ‌😐‌

Clients don't need Airtable doing 'damage control', they rather need an effective 'damage prevention'.
Namely, a careful, well-thought rollout methodology, based on extensive feedback from their super-users (top consultants).

[Quote] "this is just the first step and we intend to continue improving the experience. To start with, we are actively working to make the left navigation collapsible."

Why not doing this before rolling out the nav bar?
Some AT team seems not to be aware of the use cases of many medium-small clients.

But let’s be proactive. Now that AT succumbed to the AI wave, here’s an idea:
Use AI to extract and categorise the use cases, for which this very forum makes a rich data source.

So you may get a more accurate picture of the kind of end-users that conform AT clients base, and will avoid painful disruptions on future implementations.