Hey there,
I want to first off note that I don’t want this to sound like a complaint. :pray:
I love Airtable, and I have used it now for 3 years across countless large organisations and medium-sized clients.
I use it for everything I do. But there was always one part of the UX that I always saw stressing users out, and that was the way you can just click and accidentally add a brand new record at the bottom without ever meaning to. The process to create a record was so easy it was overwhelming, because to non-experienced, pressing command + z is often not learned, so they’d see Airtable as a place where it wasn’t safe to click anywhere (A problem later solved, in part for teams, by restricting people’s ability to add records in a base, or just using a sync so nobody can create records), and let’s not even talk about creating a record which is part of a filtered view because that’s just madness squared … But when teaching Airtable, all I’ve ever heard for 3 years now is a lot of “Whoops”…“Didn’t mean to do that”…“Whoops, where did that go?”, “Whoops, how do I?”/… etc etc etc
And even to experienced users, the daily mini-frustrations I, myself, have when accidentally creating a record and having to command + z was one thing I was sure that Airtable would fix sooner or later, so I didn’t let it bug me, and went on my merry way… Loving pretty much everything else about Airtable, creating thousands of accidental records along the way…“Whoops, command+z”
Then August 2020 hit, and they let a team mess around with the record creation flow, causing mayhem among my clients, and colleagues alike, creating, what I think is one of the longest threads on this community yet.
We all had a little moan, a little joke, and I think for the most part they changed the functionality back - even though, it’s still, in my opinion, clunkier than it was before it was messed with.
But then something happened about a month back… Whereby Airtable have given the field creation process the record treatment and made all sides of their app complete and utter minefields. So today, as I created my 10th accidental field of the day, I decided to write a polite petition to ask the UX designer and Product team…nay, BEG them to fix this!
Here’s my suggestion as an alternative:
Keep the Plus signs. They’re nice and clear. Everyone is happy :green_circle:
Please for the love of god stop messing with this empty space - This is important space that doesn’t need to be clickable 🔴
and …
If you really, REALLY have to…Why not add a little friendly round button that a user can click on, so that we can all be very comfortable that this behaviour was intentional :large_blue_circle:
It feels like this decision was made to increase field creation, which just seems mad to me. I typically want less fields…Not more! This is the graph of user frustration that I imagine the analytics doesn’t show:
Please say it’s not just me :cry:
As a side note, I’ve actually been building my bases in Google Sheets recently, and my stress levels have been decreasing as a consequence, but it still feels a little like this
And as another side note…Airtable Product team - Sorry for the rant. I rant because I care :crazy_face: … You all rock :metal: !
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