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Hey there,
I want to first off note that I donโt 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 theyโd see Airtable as a place where it wasnโt safe to click anywhere (A problem later solved, in part for teams, by restricting peopleโs ability to add records in a base, or just using a sync so nobody can create records), and letโs not even talk about creating a record which is part of a filtered view because thatโs just madness squared โฆ But when teaching Airtable, all Iโve ever heard for 3 years now is a lot of โWhoopsโโฆโDidnโt mean to do thatโโฆโWhoops, where did that go?โ, โWhoops, how do I?โ/โฆ 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 didnโt let it bug me, and went on my merry wayโฆ Loving pretty much everything else about Airtable, creating thousands of accidental records along the wayโฆโWhoops, command+zโ
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, itโs still, in my opinion, clunkier than it was before it was messed with.
But then something happened about a month backโฆ 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 teamโฆnay, BEG them to fix this!
Hereโs my suggestion as an alternative:
- Keep the Plus signs. Theyโre 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 doesnโt need to be clickable ๐ด
and โฆ
- If you really, REALLY have toโฆWhy 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 fieldsโฆNot more! This is the graph of user frustration that I imagine the analytics doesnโt show:
Please say itโs not just me :cry:
As a side note, Iโve 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 noteโฆAirtable Product team - Sorry for the rant. I rant because I care :crazy_face: โฆ You all rock :metal: !