The new Smartsheet experience
Brendan Reed
Employee
Hello Smartsheet Community!
Today we are excited to announce the launch of the new Smartsheet experience. This new experience includes updates that impact the platform, including: a refreshed, modern design for most of the desktop application; navigation improvements that consolidate global navigation into a new; always visible navigation bar; and a new Home experience that surfaces your most relevant requests and work in one place.
What’s included in this release?
1. Visual and styling changes
Throughout several areas of Smartsheet, you’ll notice a cleaner, more modern-looking design that features new fonts, new colors, and more white space. In sheets, Browse, Recents, Favorites, menus like the sharing modal, and Solution Center, you’ll notice new fonts, styling, and icons in many places.
2. Navigation updates
The top bar features a cleaner, brighter experience, which makes the search bar easier to find and use. The workspace logo has been moved to the left, and the search bar to the right.
The navigation bar, formerly known as the left rail, contains the same navigation options as before — Browse, Recents, Favorites, and Create — and is now always visible to provide quick access to sheets, reports, and dashboards with fewer clicks. The launch points for Notification Center, Launcher, Help, and Account Settings have moved from the top rail into the navigation bar, consolidating (almost) all navigation options (outside of search) into one area. Improvements to the new Notification Center enable you to segment alerts and requests in a centralized location, so you can easily see the updates that matter most to you.
The feature bar, formerly known as the right rail, has also been revamped with new icons and font, adding a fresh new style while keeping the same functionality.
3. Home experience
The new homepage experience, which will now be the default landing page when you log in, dynamically surfaces your most relevant and time-sensitive work in a single location.
In Home, you’ll find a section for all of the outstanding requests you’ve sent or received, so you can complete them when it’s convenient for you. You can open requests directly from this area, and even dismiss requests you’ve received and cancel requests you’ve sent, all in one place.
Additionally, Home has a “Suggested for You” section which uses machine learning to suggest sheets, reports, and dashboards based on your Smartsheet activity, so you can quickly jump back into work.
4. Sheets and reports
Sheets have a new look and feel: more white space, updated toolbars for grid, card, Gantt, and calendar views, and visual improvements to the File, Automation, Forms, and cell menus creating a cleaner, more modern-looking experience. We’ve also made visual changes to the row-level icons for Attachments, Comments, Proofs, and Update Requests, without changing any of the functionality you rely on.
Reports also feature the same updates as sheets: the icons and font have been updated in both the report toolbar and feature bar. Reports also have a new icon that makes it easy to distinguish between sheets and reports.
To learn more about these updates visit the new Smartsheet experience page, and check out the blog post from our Vice President of User Experience (UX) Feridoon “Doon” Malekzadeh, where he shares the thought process behind these changes and what is in store for the future.
The release of the new Smartsheet experience was only made possible thanks to your overwhelming feedback and the support of our amazing Early Adopter Program members. Thank you all for your help!
Cheers,
Brendan
Comments
Hi
not sure if i like these changes! left menu on grid view is now much wider which reduces visual space on the sheet you are working in - can I change the width?
Where has the ability gone to quickly change back and forth to different sheets - not sure these changes have been thought through properly
Regards
Ashley
Hi
Is there a way to go back to the original layout? The new design has caused all of the column headers to be way too big and then the column with row numbers on is way to wide meaning all the information we are using is in such a small space its almost impossible to use functionally.
Honest feedback, if it can't be returned to the original design may have to look at different options for our stored sheets because its not going to work and I've had nothing but complaints from my clients who have accessed their sheets today.
Thanks
Chris
how could you do this - i have lost 6 columns in width in my most used tables because of this ui change! do you guys ever really work with smartsheet, i mean some serious stuff, not just playing around with some rows and colums ... if you had, then you wouldnt have reduced the working space.
the old ui was just fine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
here some things I asked you years ago, that would provide real advantage:
this new layout is slowing me down so much that i felt the need to communicate to you about it.
this feed back is after just a bit of time this morning using the new deal.
it's friday morning and we are doing our regular weekly reports in smartsheet. im sure i will get accustomed to new view but you have hidden things now (nested) to the point that we are really seeing a slowdown, instead of a quicklook, now 2 or 3 clicks later. more clicks = more time, i really hope you allow us to revert back to old version or allow us to modify the menus: top, left and right so that we can choose which elements are noticeable without a click.
you have nested quick actions that now have require more clicks to update.:(
my feedback for you:😥😥😥
I am in complete agreement with Ashley with the changes to the visible sheet menu. This has broken my workflow making your product much less efficient to use. You absolutely have to re-enable this functionality even if it is via user setting.
It's great that you are working to improve the product but you can't depreciate functionality that impacts user workflow.
Please make the column headers resizeable vertically....the enhancement takes up 1/3 of the working space on the screen, I can barely see what I'm working on now.
It looks like the height adjusts to the char length of the column title and how narrow you've made the column, so when you have several narrow columns (like, for checkboxes) with any kind of heading title, it makes the vertical space huge and there's no way to adjust without shortening the column title or widening the columns. What was wrong with hovering over the column heading if it exceeded available space like before?
Wanted to throw more support against these changes. As someone who is working from home (like many people are) and using a small 12 inch laptop, the huge loss of real estate, both vertically and horizontally, is making this system incredibly difficult to use. I have been a huge proponent of Smartsheet for years, but I can't recommend it in this form.
Give me the option to hide navigation -- I don't need it to be visible all the time; I need more screen space. Why did the column headers get so much taller? There is a ridiculous amount of "white space" on top and bottom now so that I see less rows. I can't reduce the size, and I can't change the column names to be very short, so I am stuck.
👎
Hi all agree with all comments - you can reduce the annoying wide menu bar - far right look for the arrow up icon just below share button this grabs a bit of space back - but you then cannot see the name of your own sheet as that disappears too!! it does make you wonder if SS developers are actually SS users! like Jeff i am all in favour of improvements but not at the expense of usability - talk to users SS developers and not just the big Multi national users - we have zero support in the UK our local guy not interested and does not respond unless you are wanting to sign up for a training package of course!
This is garbage. I honestly can't think of a more disrespectful thing to do to paying customers. I've had to send out multiple emails this morning giving a heads up about this new format. Why am I having to do more work on behalf of your incompetence? If it isn't broke DONT fix it!
I have to agree. Why fix stuff that isn't broken? Looks like it was designed for 5-year olds. Even Microsoft learned that taking over people's working space with "cute" icon buttons was a mistake and have relented giving us alternatives.
BIG, BIG, BIG step backwards, Smartsheet!
Seems like over the years (and we've used SS since 2011), most of these UI/UX "improvements" have had the reverse effect. From making each sheet take a browser tab to this UI change, the result hasn't been positive.
Give us a Classic option, please? Even Microsoft has done that at times.
Thanks,
Susan
I too agree with everyone on this post. Why was this done? The headers on my sheets are 1 inch tall and I cannot make them smaller. There is so much wasted space at the top of the screen now that I cannot see all of my line items below. I never had to scroll down and now I do. A screenshot of just how big the headers are for me is below:
Why can't this be tested widely before launching into production.
Once again, Smartsheet, you failed us.
-Upset User
I have emailed Brendan at SS who launched these changes to us all and asked him if he is monitoring this forum, if so he must be worried I would think. We shall see if he actually does something about it or issues the normal corporate type of response that is highly likely i would think!
I used to be able to drag attachments from my email into Proofs. Now it's forcing me to save/download any proof files onto my desktop before I can attach/upload a file to Proofs. This is VERY time consuming, and takes up a LOT of space on my desktop. PLEASE FIX 🙏🥺
LOL my column headers are HUGE. Not even sure how this passed the test. Absolutely should have control over the size of the headers.