The new Smartsheet experience

David Pessis

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/288255#Comment_288255

Hello all,

I wanted to let you know that we launched a small update yesterday that reduced the height of column headers by 6 pixels. This is the first of many changes to come that help you maximize the use of the grid.

Thank you for your patience as we continue to roll out adjustments. We appreciate your feedback.

Susan Peck

@David Pessis Hi David, thanks for jumping in and thanks to the development team for listening to our feedback.

I've reloaded several of my sheets and I'm not sure I'm seeing that much difference? It still looks like there is almost a whole row of the header that is devoted to the icons for Comments, Attachments, etc. Can those icons not be positioned to the top of the column head? If this were an Excel sheet, I would change that alignment to recover space.

Am I missing something here?

Ashley Ryder

Agree with Susan I saw the micro change announced but if i'm honest struggled to see any difference, its great that the Feedback and Comments are being picked up on but we really need to see the changes we are asking for please. I'm guessing a return to the status quo prior to these ill thought out changes are not going to happen or even the choice to have or not have would do.

I'm getting a bit fed up with having to explain changes to my colleagues who ask what have they done that for !?! struggling to find a coherent answer

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Girish.E103301

Being a Smartsheet pro for couple of years its easy for me to identify and get used to the changes but not all the users in my org. they find it very hard with changes and guess what very next moment my inbox flooded with several emails asking about changes and I literally have to work like help desk explaining these changes. My suggestion, you should keep these changes limited to few accounts / profiles so that entire organization users will not get confused with the changes.

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Gabriella Valente

I do not like this supposed upgrade, none of our collaborators like it, why was this done? This version looks like a devolution of the program.

Becca Grube

What if my view is still the old view? How do I make it update to the new view?

Maxwell Griffith

Hi @Becca Grube! Can you please submit a Support Ticket via the link provided below explaining the situation? This may have to do with a sheet being viewed that did not receive the update.

https://help.smartsheet.com/contact/smartsheetapp

Please let me know if you have any additional questions!

Best,

Maxwell from Smartsheet

Ashley Ryder

@Brendan Reed @David Pessis

We have had a lot of reaching out from the SS team and promises of fixes to resolve the unpopular changes that have been forced upon us. We have had a micro change which nobody can seem to spot the difference in. The comments about this unpopular so called upgrade to the UX experience keep rolling in,it would be good to know please from the developers when we are going to see some meaningful changes that allow us to reclaim our lost workspace and actually address the problems we have all raised!

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La19

Hopefully, SmartSheet is hearing the feedback in these comments. Most of the issues have been captured above. Two I haven't seen explicitly mentioned yet is the rigidity of the new toolbar and the loss of the sum-of-children rows icon. (Yes I know you can manually type it in). My work time in s/s is now about 5x longer. Please bring back the old flexibility (and then add some more!). Very soon! Thank you!

[Deleted User]

@Susan B Peck @Ashley Ryder Thanks again for the feedback on the column headers. We are connecting with our UX and Dev teams to share the feedback. Please stay tuned for more from them!

Sameer Karkhanis

@David Pessis @Stephanie Boulanger @Maxwell Griffith

Thanks for the incremental updates to the issues reported.

Another suggestion for column header height improvement could be to implement the icons (lock, info, formula column) as a separate row similar to how you can show/hide the menu bar.

Another UI issue is that if a user hides any of the first 4 columns (attachment, comment, proof, indicator) there is no why to unhide by dragging the column header edges. Unhide All is not a workable solution.

Susan Peck

@Stephanie Boulanger Thanks for the response! I know I owe @Brendan Reed some more details in a private message, but I've been swamped with other deadlines.

Definitely have ideas for improving the UX.

But, the primary question that hasn't been answered is: "What was broken that needed fixing?" "What is the benefit of the UI changes?"

Many of us were very unhappy when Smartsheet changed from supporting multiple sheets in a single browser tab to forcing each sheet into a separate tab. At least you gave us the reason of improved performance (whether that is true is a matter of some debate). For the recent UI changes, you've given us no rationale except "It's New! You should like it!"

We all have work to do. We really wish Smartsheet would look at some of the other long-standing feature requests and improvement suggestions. I doubt any of those included giving us larger icons and taking away precious real estate or moving common tools around. (I had trouble finding Help the other day!)

Just some thoughts.

Susan