The new Smartsheet experience

Brian Millet · 04/16/21

Would like the ability to revert back to a Classic option as well. Lots of complaints from our team.

Susan Peck · 04/16/21

And the loss of the "hamburger" menu is a big loss. The new left bar is clunky and requires many more clicks to switch among sheets. I use 6-10 sheets throughout the day. What a waste of time!

Steve Schmidt · 04/16/21

Please, please, add a Back to Classic option to sheets, as you have on the dashboards. The new experience gobbles up so much more of the screen space than the old UI, which reduces how much actual work users can see. I'm surprised at how much less I can see of my sheet now, and not finding any real benefit for all the extra space the new UI consumes. So much space seems wasted now. Feels like a big step backward.

Andy Mirza · 04/16/21

What an unpleasant surprise this morning and I echo many of the complaints of others. By far, the worst change for me is the loss of my "pinned" sheets on the left rail. I use 14 sheets heavily throughout the day and it's always been very easy for me to switch between sheets and having them automatically save each time.

Now, I'm forced to click "Recents" each time I want to switch a sheet.

Even on a big screen, the top row with the column headers takes up a lot of room and is not adjustable.

I liked the old tool bar better, please bring it back.

I never use the icons on the right rail. If you must, please put them on the top banner where there is nothing now so that it frees up more space on the right. I'm scrolling left and right all the time to look at my data. Or at least give the option of having it there or not.

I do like the feature of the far left of a row being highlighted as I move the mouse of over the screen. It would be even better if the whole row were highlighted. On the older version, I'd have to click on the row on the left to highlight the row and scroll to make sure I was reading the correct info. Highlighting the row as I scroll over the screen would be very useful to me.

Ashley Ryder · 04/16/21

FAO - Brendan Reed @ Smart Sheet

Brendan not one good comment about these changes introduced today which hopefully you are finding deeply concerning, also no response to date from the email I sent to you which is also rather troubling I do hope your customers do not have to resort to contacting your CEO/President to voice their frustrations - please reverse these unwanted changes that appear to benefit nobody!

Cody_Turpin · 04/16/21

The entirety of the new UX is worse. It is now harder to access things, and there is unnecessary padding around most tooltips- everything is too large. If this is the path you want to go, that's fine, but there absolutely needs to be a way to customize scaling, a collapsible sidebar, and some consolidation of headers + tool tips, etc.

Example of scaling down everything, giving us usable space back

Cody_Turpin · 04/16/21

Please validate this statement @Brendan Reed

AKunce · 04/16/21

"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!"

Don't try to place the blame for this hot mess on others.

Susan Peck · 04/16/21

Why aren't any of those EAP members posting here to explain why this new interface is so much better? It still begs the question: "Was it broken before?"

There are a lot of other features I think most of us heavy users would have preferred to see time and money put to.

Sue Hill · 04/16/21

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ColumnHeadersGone.JPG

Help, my Column headers have disappeared!

Beth O · 04/16/21

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

Completely agree with Ashley here. This new left menu on the grid takes up soooo much valuable real estate.

Also, why don't you give users a heads up that this is deploying on your release notes? A "coming soon". For me this deployed at late afternoon on Th 4/15/21 and was unexpected. I had to quickly check-in with all my Smartsheet users to make sure they were orienting okay.

Brendan Reed · 04/16/21

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to provide us with detailed feedback.

Smartsheet takes great care and consideration when introducing new design elements into the app, and we test all changes thoroughly to ensure our choices are the best solution for our customers as a whole. The new Smartsheet layout and interface should help our customers get started and use Smartsheet more quickly and easily, and lays the foundation for a series of powerful enhancements to the product that will roll out over the next year.

A number of you have noted the changes we have made to both the grid and the column headers.

This has been a popular piece of feedback since we’ve launched the new Smartsheet experience.

Here is what we’ve heard so far:

The navigation bar needs to be adjustable or collapsable, it takes up too much space
The toolbar above sheets takes up too much space
Column headers on sheets and reports are too large and you can’t adjust the height

These are all valid pieces of feedback and we are actively looking at options. If your feedback is not accounted for on the above list, please submit an enhancement request and we’ll be sure to address it.

We will be releasing an update during the week of April 19th that will reduce the amount of empty space above column names. In the meantime, there are two features you can leverage in order to maximize your working space in sheets:

1. Smartsheet has a ‘full screen’ view built into sheets. Look for the icon in the bottom left corner of a sheet - this is how you enter full-screen view. In this view, the navbar and toolbar disappear, maximizing your work area in a sheet.

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2. There is also a small chevron icon right under the share button. Clicking this icon will collapse the toolbar, giving you more usable space in your sheet.

We are working on updating our help article to consolidate all of these great questions so that we can respond to them in one place. We will continue to update this help article as we see questions come in.

We want to thank you again for taking the time to provide this valuable feedback. As we continue to review each comment and share it with our product team, we will send you a private message within Community to help ensure that your voice is heard. Please look out for a response in the coming week.

Note: You can access your private messages by clicking the mail icon in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.

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Thank you,

Brendan

Dan Talley · 04/16/21

Hello, I would have to agree with the comments listed, this new UX has hampered our workflow and slowed down my teams daily tasks. While I appreciate your response to this forum, none of the suggestions will get us back to where we were. Add one more vote for the classic layout option. Thx

Maxwell Griffith · 04/16/21

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/287860#Comment_287860

@Ashley Ryder, @Chris Reed, @arkitektur, @Jason Koscinski, @Jeff Bruce, @lhadduck, @User45678, @alano10, @Miles Allison, @Susan B Peck, @LanceAlbanese, @Robin Summers, @Nathan Gonzalez, @Brian Millet, @Steve Schmidt, @Andy Mirza, @Cody_Turpin, @AKunce, @Sue Hill, @Beth O, @Dan Talley, @andri witana, @Srinivasan Sankaran, @Sean Stran, @Stefan, @ker9, @Yechiel Binet, @Ryan W, @Tracy Ostapa (GroupeX), @Beth Tiggelaar, @A01-TT, @Patti Farr, @Michael1115, @Amy Keach, @Lee Carr, @Cody Holmes, @Kyle Contorno

Hello All, Thanks so much for your valuable feedback. I wanted to make sure you saw Brendan's response. Please note that he will be working to reach out to you all individually to further discuss any questions or concerns. Please keep an eye out for his response in your private inbox within Community.

Best,

Maxwell from Smartsheet

Susan Peck · 04/16/21

@Maxwell Griffith, @Brendan Reed - thank you for responding publicly to the forum. We haven't seen much of that from Smartsheet in recent years after major UX or feature changes, so kudos for you.

I'll look forward to receiving the private response. Already I've put together some screenshots for improving the look and reducing the space used by the interface changes. I won't post them here, out of respect to your request above, but I do hope you will listen to those of use who use Smartsheet daily, are responsible for many other Smartsheet users, and have participated in the Smartsheet forum regularly for years. Perhaps some of us missed the invitation to become an EAP or perhaps we were too busy with our real jobs. We rely on Smartsheet as a tool and to have that tool radically changed is a bit of a shock.

Thank you again for responding to the feedback you've received here.

Best regards,

Susan

The new Smartsheet experience

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