A brand new table report experience

Earlier this year, we embarked on a journey to modernize the Quick Base interface. We committed to doing this in a safe and methodical way and began discussing some of the trade-offs on this Community post. We are proud to say that the time is almost here for customers to be getting their hands on our first large slice of this – the new table report – and providing us valuable feedback. This process will be slow and methodical. At the start, we will be more restrictive about the types of apps and environments that are suitable. As we add features and address bugs, that net will continue to widen. Here is the current progress:

Throughout this modernization process, your feedback will be critical for its success.  To that end, we are exploring a private, invite-only, forum, right here in the Quick Base Community where engaged builders can ask questions, read about progress and even provide some unstructured feedback to our interaction designers and/or engineers.

We first showed you the new table report at Empower 2019 and it was clear users were excited. So, we spent the time since then working on the foundation of the house which includes things like getting core interaction components in place and optimizing for performance. I have one test with 500,000 records that is achieving about a 10x improvement over our current report.

As we start on our multi-phased early access process, we want to be transparent and open. At the onset, we are going to be looking for feedback on the framing of the house. That is the walls, electricity and plumbing. It isn't yet time to pick out the floors and the cabinets. Bringing it back to this, not every field type is completely supported yet and the implemented design is not perfectly aligned with the vision of our talented designers. We hope you are as excited as we are to try this new feature. When enabled, users will be able to toggle on and off the new report.

Quick Base is used by hundreds of thousands of users across over 100,000 applications. For the most part, no two applications are the same and we regularly say to customers "You did what with Quick Base!?". That makes our job of objectively choosing what to implement (and when) somewhat challenging. We are doing our best to meet or exceed industry best practices while also keeping things somewhat familiar for those of you that have been using the platform for years. This sometimes requires us to make tough decisions, such as migrating away from dynamic filters and onto column filters. We acknowledge that some people may prefer the legacy style but are prioritizing data density and a more approachable interaction with column filters.

Participating in the early access means a few things:

• You are going to be using a feature in early access that is not production ready. It may be unstable, do things you don't expect and not include something you are used to. Quick Base does not guarantee the stability of any feature in early access and normal SLAs and Care channels are not applicable.
  • While in early EA, the original table experience is still fully supported and maintained.
• You should have a close relationship with your users in the early stages of testing. This is so that you can set good expectations with them on what is and out of scope and so they can funnel feedback that you can ultimately convey to us.
• Updates to this feature will not go through regular release cycles.
• We may reach out to end users who have toggled back to the old report to gather feedback from them. This may include a brief survey. Builders in the early access program should be able to dedicate time to review the feature with Quick Base staff as needed.
• Feature access may be turned off at any time, without notice. It isn't a decision we take lightly, but it could happen if we notice issues!

It is important to remember that the new table report component is using our modern continuous deployment model. During early access, you should expect frequent bug fixes and enhancements that will come without any notice. These could be weekly or daily. We are rigorous about quality but expect there to be hiccups along the way as we tackle such a large and critical piece of Quick Base. If you are interested in working with us to test and provide feedback, we ask that you carefully consider which of your applications make the most sense for this.

For most people reading the post, the next steps are simply to get excited and talk to your user base to make sure their expectations are set. You will hear from us with directions on how to apply for EA within the next few weeks. Remember to stay tuned to our release notes, as that is our official channel for product features.