Kanban Cards Need To Be More Compact

[Dan_Kang1]

I am trying to convert from Asana to Airtable using Kanban cards. But the Kanban cards, even with the recent improvements hiding fields if they are empty, are still too chunky. Using a non Kanban view on Asana. I can see 15 tasks without having to scroll down, and their Kanban view will show around 5 tasks. But with Airtable, the cards are so huge, I can only see 2 or 3 cards before I have to scroll down.

If there was an option on each card to show a compact view or a standard view, it would greatly improve the usability of Kanban cards with airtable.

The compact view only needs to show the title, and if you want to see more of the card you can toggle the standard view.

This would greatly increase the usability and help me move everything off of Asana.

[Ben_Gammon]

The lack of usability for Kanban view is crazy. Similar to Trello, this is one of the reasons we opted to port over our product management to Airtable; however, the lack of support for Kanban on mobile and the title truncated makes it unusuable on the road or during meetings.

This would solve a lot of pain, Airtable!

[Quinn_Morgan]

This is the sole reason our product team won’t be adopting Airtable. You can’t see what things are with three words visible tops. Clicking into the card to read the title (or hovering) is simply too cumbersome.

I have tried three times thinking maybe I could make it work because I want everything else in Airtable so badly, but this simple change would earn them a paying team instantly.

[Jon_Elling]

Perhaps the solution here is to let a Kanban view select a Page Designer object to use as the template for the card? AirTable should still offer a nicer looking default card - seriously, why haven’t you done this? - but it would allow deeper customization so you don’t have to solve everyone’s problem and create further product stickiness.

[Nathan_Broadben]

Hi everyone. I was also really disappointed when I imported all my Trello cards into Airtable and realized that the Kanban cards could only display the first few words from my titles. So I decided to fix it with some custom CSS on userstyles dot org.

To use this custom CSS, first you need to install the Stylish browser extension. Then go to the userstyles dot org website, and search for the “Airtable - Better Kanban Titles” style. (Sorry, I’m not allowed to include any links in my post!)

I was able to make the font smaller and allow up to two lines, instead of one. That used up all of the available margin, and unfortunately I’m not able to add more lines without access to the JavaScript source code. (The cards use position: absolute and they calculate the heights and offsets in JS, so I can’t do too much else here.) But I think this is already a huge improvement.

Please try it out and let me know if you run into any issue! And hopefully the Airtable designers will add this as a built-in option.

[Jeffrey_Bowdoin]

Yes 100% Agree. The number one feature needed to change on kanban is allowing the full title to show. The benefit of kanban is to see an overview. Its kind of useless without being able to quickly glance at the titles (getting cut off).

Thank you so much @Nathan_Broadbent for posting your fix. I googled your blog post and found the solution. For anyone looking for his solution, google: Migrating From Trello To Airtable + formapi

Super quick and easy using the extension!

[Subir_Kumeda]

Yes, I’m running against this issue as well. Even on my 30in monitor. It’s disappointing that there isn’t a compact option(s) to hide labels and reduce the vertical space.

[Subir_Kumeda]

Hi. Is there any possibility of expanding this to also placing label items in the same line as the label, if not removing the labels header entirely

[James_Grumish]

As of Q1 2019, Trello starting limiting the number of boards to free groups – more than 10 boards needs to pay.

The Kanban feature of Airtable could potentially grab some market-share from teams looking for a suitable alternative to paid Trello, but the Airtable cards don’t quite “stack up” (I’m so sorry) and could benefit from some attention, especially in relation to the ideas mentioned above over a long period of time.

Longer title support is very necessary – four words is simply not enough. Even in support documentation examples we see things like “Install green lighting for…”, “New enclosure for poiso…”, “Get quote for shaking ro…”, “Checklists for earthqua…”. Any task that starts with a procedure/verb (“Get quote for”) will probably not have enough room for the subject on the card title.

The secondary field labels are a more difficult. If magical, they could be optionally included in the card. This would be useful when two fields share the same data format – e.g. “Start Date” and “End Date” would need to have labels to be effective. But if the data can stand on its own, the label could be omitted – e.g. description and owner would probably not require labels that could be easily inferred.

Airtable kanban is a great tool. Hopefully this feedback is helpful. Thanks for your time. – JVG

[Deborah_Lefkowi]

So folk have been complaining about this issue for a year now. Is there anyway to know if AirTable plans to fix this? Seems like they are losing market share over a failure to make basic improvements to Kanban board functionality. We are also considering a move from Trello as it’s not great for requirements management, but this might be a showstopper.

[wrasse]

You all are asking for a feature that’s really easy to just build yoruself. Simply use the concatenate () function in the index field.

All of my KanBan cards are one line. Here’s an example function I wrote for my fish tank dosing.
CONCATENATE({Tank},’ - ',{Element}, ’ - ', {Ammount}, ’ ’ ,{Measure})

It outputs something like “Large Tank - Iodine - 2 Drops”

and I sort my KanBan by Day, So I have a weekly overview.

Very easy honestly. I don’t see why AirTable would even consider adding this when it already can be done. All of my KanBan cards are one line.