Petition for the attention of the (wonderful) Airtable Product Team - Please decouple the Add Field and Add Record buttons from a Table 🙏

[andywingrave]

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:

1. Keep the Plus signs. They’re nice and clear. Everyone is happy :green_circle:
2. Please for the love of god stop messing with this empty space - This is important space that doesn’t need to be clickable 🔴

and …

3. 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: !

[ScottWorld]

They literally do not care. We are better off talking to a brick wall.

I know you were just pointing out some old interface changes, but remember that tech support told me that they are 100% committed to all the new interface changes, and that they will not be changing them. (I previously mentioned this in some thread somewhere.) They literally don’t care that our clients accidentally create hundreds of new records every day, and they literally don’t care that our clients accidentally create dozens of new fields every day.

Want to see dramatic improvements in Airtable? Require the Airtable engineers to exclusively use their own product (Airtable) every day for a month. I guarantee you that everything will radically improve within 30 days.

But until the Airtable engineers “eat their own dog food“ (that’s a software development phrase), they will never respect their users.

[kuovonne]

andywingrave:

For some reason it is hypothesised that no matter what cell a user is on, they want their attention to be drawn to an empty checkbox???

Are you sorting or filtering on that checkbox field?

I get the impression that Airtable is making these UX/UI decisions based on isolated issues, and not the entire experience. Most of these design changes make one specific thing easier … at the expense of the overall experience when the user is not interested in that specific thing.

Airtable has always had a beautiful looking user interface. As Airtable is trying to improve the usability of the interface, it is going through some growing pains. In some cases it seems like “the cure is worse than the disease.” Hopefully Airtable will discover better cures (UX/UI changes) without these undesirable side effects.

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

“eat their own dog food“ (that’s a software development phrase)

Actually, it’s not. In the 1970s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another early origin is from the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings. Both of these uses predate the software development market as we know it and literally are founded in the dog food market itself.

But I agree - Airtable engineers should feel good enough about their product to use it invariably to solve data management problems, and I suspect they do, but probably not in stringent ways.

[ScottWorld]

Bill.French:

Actually, it’s not. In the 1970s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another early origin is from the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings.

Ha, I love learning about the incredible history of these widely-used phrases! Thank you!

What I meant was that I was not calling Airtable “dog food”, and that it is a commonly-used phrase in the software industry.

[kuovonne]

ScottWorld:

But until the Airtable engineers “eat their own dog food“ (that’s a software development phrase), they will never respect their users.

To some extent they do this already. Every beta that I’ve signed up for requires signing up through an Airtable form. When I submit details on a marketplace app, I do so through an Airtable form. Usually these forms have at least one value prefilled. Thus, they must be using Airtable for some of their internal processes.

There are reasons why Airtable using its own product internally might not produce the results you desire.

• Airtable staff using Airtable have access to internal information on how the product works and why they are making the changes. When an Airtable staff member sees a highlighted column, they already know why it is highlighted and it isn’t as distracting. Airtable staff know what actions will create a new record, so they don’t do it when they don’t want to create a new record. Their knowledge of the product means that they simply aren’t as confused by these issues.

• How Airtable staff uses Airtable internally might not match how your clients use Airtable. If the use cases are different, the users will prioritize different things from the user experience.

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

What I meant was that I was not calling Airtable “dog food”

I didn’t sense that you were using dog food as a metaphor for the product itself; purely a figure of speech that appears to have merit.

kuovonne:

How Airtable staff uses Airtable internally might not match how your clients use Airtable.

Extremely important point. I also imagine that they are using it profusely inside Airtable but that their usage is also deeply biased to the point where their own work with the product could be working against them. This was apparent at Microsoft (Access), FoxPro (precursor to Access), dBase IV (Borland), etc. All of these teams grew disconnected as success and adoption rose. They each found ways to eliminate the internal biases to create solutions that reached very high user happiness quotients.

[kuovonne]

According to this page, Airtable is looking for a Quantitative User Experience Researcher and a User Experience Researcher.

Here are selected points under both “What you’ll do” headings. I find it an interesting list, both in what they include and what they don’t include. For example, there is no explicit mention of this community in either job posting. Nor is there a mention of interacting with 3rd party consultants or experts.

• Plan and conduct quantitative research, such as logs analysis and survey research

• Manage ongoing survey research programs, such as churn, onboarding, and NPS survey programs

• Plan and conduct qualitative or quantitative research, such as in-depth interviews or surveys, to deeply understand Airtable’s customers

• Partner with functional teams across Airtable throughout the entire product development lifecycle

• Communicate insights and evangelize the voice of the customer across the company

• Enable others at Airtable to conduct their own research and make customer-centric decisions

[Airtable_Clerk]

Bill, I agree about who’s the source of discomfort; Scott’s just the messenger.

Interesting that you guys are seeing evidence of support pushing features to production.

Yes, VisiCalc was the 1st spreadsheet (God bless Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston), but VisiCalc didn’t include an integrated database. I guess there are probably obscure footnote products that had the two, but it was Lotus’ claim to fame (along with Lotus notes.)

[andywingrave]

Hooray! They fixed this for fields! Thank you!!!

[ScottWorld]

What did they fix?? Both myself and my clients are still struggling with clicking to the right of a grid view, and having a new field appear!! Soooooo annoying. It’s making my life a complete nightmare working in Airtable!