Product Suggestion: Please stop showing new View Sidebar

[ScottWorld]

Starting yesterday, Airtable rolled out a new sidebar in the left margin to display the views in our base.

This is fine, but please stop auto-opening this sidebar by default.

Every time we refresh our web browser or enter a base, this view sidebar auto-opens.

It takes up a significant amount of screen real estate, and it is a real pain to continually be closing this new sidebar. Every time we enter a base, we have to close the view sidebar again.

The vast majority of people aren’t continually switching views constantly throughout the day. For this to be ever-present and taking up a significant amount of screen real estate is not helpful.

This should stay closed by default.

p.s. The old view switcher was not difficult to find or use.

[Indresh_Kumar]

Disappointed that Airtable has decided to stick with this despite all the backlash.

Airtable team - here is a better question - what will it take for you guys to revert back to the old dropdown? Is there a usage metric that is helping you decide? Is the metric giving you the indication that the old method was worse?

[Jeremy_Beasley]

This new UI pattern is a regression. It objectively makes the experience worse on a lot of levels with no real upside.

Here are a few to start:

1. It uses too much real estate. The canvas for the view is now a fixed height of the entire window versus simply spanning the number of views you have up until a certain point (after which you scroll).

2. The primary actions for adding views now locked at the bottom. They previously were much quicker to access. Now I have to navigate all the way to the bottom of the screen. That a ton of hoping around.

3. The interaction of opening and closing the sidebar is just bizarre. There are two UI elements do the same thing— trigger opening and closing the panel by clicking “view” and/or “grid view”. Click “View” make sense—there’s even an icon to give some affordance to what might happen. Clicking the name of the view makes no sense.

There are a ton of issues with this direction. What happened?

[Rebekah_Bryant]

Agree - please get rid of the Views sidebar - or allow us to keep it closed. Agree - it’s not necessary and takes up too much space and is annoying to have to close frequently. Thank you!

[ScottWorld]

Indresh_Kumar:

Disappointed that Airtable has decided to stick with this despite all the backlash.

Jeremy_Beasley:

This new UI pattern is a regression. It objectively makes the experience worse on a lot of levels with no real upside.

Rebekah_Bryant:

please get rid of the Views sidebar - or allow us to keep it closed. Agree - it’s not necessary and takes up too much space and is annoying to have to close frequently

Jeremy & Indresh & Rebkah,

I agree with all of you a million times over!

Please be sure to email support@airtable.com with your complaints about this new feature.

It is extremely disappointing & disheartening to me that the Airtable team does not seem to listen to their users here. From my personal experience, they don’t seem to make any attempts to have a two-way dialogue with us here, nor does it seem to me like they care about addressing the (many) usability issues in their product that people have been logging in the community forum.

This #show-and-tell:product-suggestions category is filled with years’ worth of repeated requests over & over again for different usability problems in the product, and nearly all of the issues remain unresolved to this day.

In my opinion, it seems like the Airtable team simply doesn’t have an open ear to what we have to say, and they certainly don’t appear to have a two-way dialogue with their top users who are part of this community!

Personally, it makes me feel invisible & voiceless & demoralized, because it feels like the Airtable Team has a “closed ear” policy to what their users in this community are saying. :frowning:

I love Airtable and I’m a huge Airtable evangelist. But for me, the saddest part about working with Airtable is that I consistently feel like the Airtable Team simply doesn’t care about what we have to say. :frowning:

[Will_Smith]

+1. Please fix Airtable to remember that I’ve closed the sidebar. Having to re-close it every time I open Airtable might not seem like a big deal, but it is a nuisance and intrusive.

Also, more broadly, remembering that I’ve closed the sidebar is what users have been trained to expect because it’s the way all other software works, that is, it remembers my UX settings so I don’t have to change them every time I re-enter the software.

[Kerry_Kriger1]

Airtable should not force the All Views left sidebar into all my bases. This is extremely annoying and invasive. I don’t need that view. It is distracting to always have to close it every time I open a base. Airtable should allow users the option to disable that feature and return to how things were prior to a couple months ago…with the base opening and NOT showing All Views left sidebar.

[ScottWorld]

Well, for a few weeks, Airtable temporarily fixed one of the 5 huge sidebar problems.

For a few weeks, upon opening a base from the Home Screen, the sidebar finally respected our previous selection of whether the sidebar was opened or closed.

But now, the sidebar has gone back to its previous bad behavior:

Now, whenever we open a base from the Home Screen, the sidebar ALWAYS re-opens again.

This really needs to be fixed.

I have no idea why Airtable is trying to shove the sidebar in our face at all times — it feels like they’re standing on the side of the road, frantically jumping up & down and waving their arms, shouting “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!” It’s almost like they feel like the sidebar is the MOST IMPORTANT part of Airtable… and that it constantly needs to be shoved in our face.

I have no idea what the thinking is behind this, but please, Airtable, WE GET IT. We understand that there’s a View sidebar. We applaud you for having different views in your product. Big pats on the back and high-fives all the way around. But we don’t need this shoved in our face at all times. We KNOW IT’S THERE. Just like every other button on the toolbar. We KNOW that the buttons are there. Everybody can see the toolbar. Everybody can see the options. PLEASE stop forcing this on us.

THANK YOU.

@Adam_Minich

[ScottWorld]

I just discovered problem #6 with the view sidebar:

If we close a base and re-open it later, Airtable doesn’t remember the previous WIDTH that we set our sidebar to. So every time we re-open a base, we have to constantly re-adjust the width of our sidebar.

@Adam_Minich

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

It appears Airtable may have addressed several of your concerns:

[ScottWorld]

@Jeremy_Oglesby

Yes! Thank you! :slightly_smiling_face: As of this week, they have now fixed essentially 100% of the problems with the sidebar, even the brand new problems that I just discovered a few weeks ago!! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: :raised_hands: :sparkles: :dizzy: :star2: :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

So, I feel like everything is pretty much resolved at this point regarding the new sidebar. I’m super thrilled with the progress they’ve made on this. :slightly_smiling_face:

This really feels like an elegant part of the user interface now, and it should hopefully appeal to everyone — no matter what their preferences are. It really feels like a delight to use now. :slightly_smiling_face:

At this point, the only remaining “problems” are not even “problems” anymore, but simply “feature requests” or “personal preferences” that might improve things just a tiny bit more:

1. I LOVE the “slide over” behavior of the sidebar. It only appears momentarily while you choose a view, and then it slides out of view again when you’re done switching views. This is fantastic! Perfect behavior. However, the sidebar often accidentally appears when we’re just trying to move our mouse towards the direction of the first tab (i.e. we’re trying to go back to the first table). So perhaps the sidebar could have a little bit lengthier delay before opening when our mouse moves over the name of the view.

2. I would love it if the sidebar applied its settings to individual TABLES instead of the entire BASE. That way, we could have one table where the sidebar is open & wide, another table where the sidebar is open & narrow, another table where the sidebar is closed altogether, etc.

3. I feel like it could be a little more helpful if the “Views” button was full width at all times. That way, you could hover your mouse over any area of the word “Views” and keep clicking your mouse in the same exact spot — and the sidebar would open or close. Currently, if you close the Views menu but then you realize that you need to immediately re-open it again, you often have to “chase” the button because the button has narrowed itself down again. For all the other buttons (Sort, Filter, Color, etc.), you can just keep your mouse hovered on top of them in the exact same spot and keep clicking to open or close the buttons. The “View” button is the only button that changes its width while your mouse is still hovering there. (The other buttons do change their width too, but not until you have already moused away from them to click on something else.)

Besides those 3 feature requests, I feel like everything is perfect now!

Thanks to the Airtable team for radically improving this! :slightly_smiling_face: