New Airtable Home Screen

Airtable has rolled out a new homescreen experience. Most people that I’ve spoken to dislike it, especially because you can no longer rearrange bases & workspaces into whatever custom order you want anymore.

If you have feedback about the new home screen experience, Airtable is apparently collecting feedback here:

Yah, I’ve already sent them feedback.

I describe the feature needing as “regions” or “categories” within Workspaces. As a workspace is primarily geared by billing, which in turn dictates a bases feature set - the idea of simply using Workspaces to categorise bases falls short, as typically users like myself are stuck with one paid workspace, and many unpaid workspaces - which results in a handful of bases in free workspaces (which can be named/semi-categorised as such), but an overwhelming amount of bases all stacked into the Paid workspace - with no method to organise them aside from colours, icons and dragging their physical position within that workspace.

As having one paid workspace and multiple free workspaces doesn’t really allow for any base management, my proposal to Airtable is to allow for users to categorise their bases within a workspace, which can then be used for sorting either via a Workspace list, or perhaps regional style drag-and-drop sorting within each workspace, where the user may drag bases into a desired region/collection, and other bases into other region/collections - each region/collection being a divider as such - they’re essentially a category (or project, or whatever you want to call it).

So along comes the new Home Page, and not only does it not have a feature that address this many base management issue (I’m talking about like, 50-100 bases in a workspace), they also removed the ability that at least allows users to manually position bases within the workspace. Instead, adding a base star mechanism, that means users have to star a base, where THEN they can manage the base order of the starred list… not very functional. I get it - minimal handiness, but a broken Home Page / Workspace experience non-the-less.

I think a lot of the problem stems from Workspaces being tied to billing. Realistically, my email account should be tied to billing, and I should be able to create as many Pro workspaces as I see fit to manage my countless bases and projects.

/end coffee rant. :coffee:

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I really feel like they are actively taking steps to make their product LESS usable.

The one part of Airtable that nobody has ever complained about in the last 6 years is the home screen.

And then they took away everything that made it great.

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That everyone is FORCED to adopt.

When will they learn about new experience opt-in switch?

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I did NOT know you could rearrange bases as you saw fit. That would have made the old home screen experience much more useable. I actually did actively dislike the old home screen and am moderately happier with the new home screen, largely because of the ability to star and other flexibilities.

I do think the main obstacle in making the Home screen more useable is @Karlstens point about Workspaces being tied to billing rather than being a mechanism for organization.

Yes, this was one of the primary benefits of the old home screen. But true, we couldn’t star/favorite bases. They should’ve just added favoriting to the old Home Screen and called it a day.

Yeah, their billing is very problematic.

Really hoping Airtable sort out this Homescreen. Some more scathing reviews of their beta have been posted - I’m hoping they take stock and just give us what we’ve all been asking for.

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Where did you see these reviews?

On the official Airtable Thread;

Here’s the latest;

This new home screen is terrible! I can’t find the things I need and now the order I want them in is gone too. When active and inactive projects used to be sorted by me are now all mixed together you have given me more work instead of making my workflow easier. PLEASE give me a way to go back to the old home screen.

At least we can flick between the new and old Home Screen, and I’m also feeling positive that they will address the communities concerns, as the community has been fairly vocal about their dissatisfaction with the latest changes.

Oh, that’s great, thanks! :slight_smile:

I unsubscribed from that thread, so I didn’t even realize that 3 people had commented negatively after me. I’m so happy that people are speaking up, but I hope that ENOUGH people are speaking up for them to listen.

Historically, Airtable has not listened to customer feedback, and I can see competitors like SmartSuite gaining a rising marketshare as people become continually frustrated with Airtable and turning to a competitor that is all about actively listening to their customers.

Yeah, simply having the ability to create folders within a workspace would solve 80% of the issues… but no.

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Hi,

Being a Scripter and an early hours Beta Scripting Block Afficionado, I can tell that in 2020 I was sometimes read by Airtable Dev that was present and reacting inside Community Scripting Threads but that terribly few suggestions from me were taken into account or else 18 months later when I had to design a ton of workaround to move forward on my side.

The worst example of this was : View is always a blackbox if you want to create and manipulate it programmatically.

I was probably more diligent than the Airtable staff in reading the Product Suggestions section of the old Airtable discourse Forum.

I fear that this is a wrong path that Airtable seems to persist in and I don’t think that this is a way of managing Airtable that is beneficial to their future.

oLπ

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But, it may also be responsible for creating 90% of the future problems no one has anticipated. :wink: We’ve proven over three decades that folders tend to make matters worse, not better.

The end of organizing.

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It would be great, if when you book marked the home screen, it would save the current Workspace, sort mode, and Both/Bases Only/Interfaces only settings. I need to set these three fields EVERY time I go to the home screen. I understand that everyone has different needs, and the average user needs works on only a few bases regularly. But for those of us who have to regularly view a complete set of bases in a workspace, or a large enough set so that starring a large, constantly changing set of bases is a common thing, the new Home Screen is a colossal time drain.

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The big conceit here on Airtable’s side is that they are making the mistaken assumption that just because we “recently viewed” a base, that it is now our most important base in the world and that it should take highest priority & highest precedence over all of our other bases.

This is absolutely not true.

I may need to pop into a rarely-used or archived base to quickly grab a piece of information, but I may not need to pop into that base for another year after that.

But now, this base is at the very top of my home screen because I recently viewed it? I may not need to use this base ever again, but Airtable is forcing it front-and-center into my face.

Things were nearly perfect before. We had nearly-full ability of rearranging our workspaces & bases the way we wanted to organize them.

The only flaw in the past was that the “Bases Shared With Me” section didn’t allow us to rearrange the bases, which need to be fixed.

But instead of fixing that one flaw, Airtable decided to make the ENTIRE THING flawed.

:man_facepalming:t2:

Excited to see a notification when I logged in about how they are delaying the rollout of the new Home Screen based on feedback. No longer being forced into using it…for now at least!

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@kmessmerized Oh, wow! That’s fantastic news!! Thanks for sharing the good news! :smiley: :raised_hands:

Unfortunately for people who are already rolled out can’t roll back. I don’t have go-back-to-old-button on the top right. I am sending them too many emails to support so I guess they send everything from me to spam.

Just a reminder to everyone that Airtable is collecting feedback about the new home screen here: