More Thoughts on the New Navigational Changes

steven.reed14881

Based on comments I have seen in the Community so far, the reception to the new navigation is anything but glowing. Personally, I am giving it a chance, adapting day by day. I do like the new overall look and feel, and additional real estate gained when the left side navigation window is collapsed. However, the inflexibility of that left window is also the most inefficient part of the change.

The new navigation has imposed the following series of events to access your content:

• Click on the hamburger menu to open the navigation window--defaulting to Recents
• Click on the icon you want--if it is other than Recents
• For Recents and Favorites, it is then just one more click to select your sheet/report/dashboard
• For Home, you still have to navigate to your sheet and however many levels of folders or Workspaces it takes

Ideally, I would like to see the option for the small window (with the Home, Recent, Favorites, and New icons) to open when you hover over it--or the ability to pin it. Then you would click on whichever section (Home, Recent, Favorites, or New) you want to visit, reducing the number of clicks. After some period of inactivity, the navigation window should then close again, eliminating the current requirement to manually close that window. 

It seems to me that the significant changes that Smartsheet from the past were always in response to what the tool really needed--new functionality (cross-sheet formulas, dashboards,, etc.) and navigational improvements (move formatting icons to a ribbon across the top, for example). I think this most recent change can follow in that direction, but tweaks are needed.

 

Steve

Brad Jones

Point of fact:

The folder/workspace tree was already collapsed when you had a sheet open, so this change did not actually grant any appreciable new free space to the sheet views.

This change was likely implemented because they had some other feature or software that they wanted to integrate and this was a stepping stone on the way towards that future objective.  It does not appear that it was done to make the users happier, as there is only one positive post about this update out of the multitudes of vitriol.