During a platform transformation, I led the redesign of several of Smartsheet's most high-traffic, high-impact tools – like Filter, Sort, Search, and Formatting. My work resulted in a simplified toolset that has earned customer and stakeholder praise.
2023 – 2024
Delivered to Market
A few highlights from the improved Smartsheet UX
Smartsheet was ready to rethink its core tools and controls
As time marches on, design that once felt fresh grows stale – and with almost a decade of growth and change since the last serious redesign, it was time.
Aiming for a modern, approachable, and professional segment of the market requires thoughtful design centered in customer use cases.
Didn't have time to try
Hard to use the product
Hard to learn the product
~25%
~15%
~10%
Prospective customers have consistently ranked 'hard to use' and 'hard to learn' as their top reasons for trial attrition.
Key Outcomes
Positive customer and stakeholder sentiment
Aligned large stakeholder group around significant platform experience changes.
Improved and altered UX for large, legacy customer base with minimal migration pain or onboarding needed.
Improved task efficiency for key scenarios
Unlocked faster & easier Filtering – Smartsheet's most-used sheet feature with hundreds of millions of interactions per year.
Enhanced in-sheet search (Find) experience to provide the lowest-impact, most approachable sheet tool.
Scale, unlocked – for data, layout, and collaborators
Evolved controls to function cohesively in a Real Time Collaboration (RTC) environment with automatically saved changes.
Built control forms that scale across multiple data layouts – Table, Kanban, Timeline, Gantt
The Redesign Process
First, understanding context and structure
Big goals
Get a clear understanding of stakeholder desires – and market motivations – for a redesign.
Customer pain points
Using varied research approaches, dig in on the pain points in the current UX, and customer needs.
Information architecture
Clarify the key patterns and zones needed, and lay out a scalable framework for the new tool set.
Then, feature-by-feature improvements
Core tools
Dig in on redesigning specific tools, top-to-bottom – uncovering all the idiosyncrasies of each.
Fit & finish
With a set of redesigned tools, look across the system to align styling and clean up pattern usage.
Release to market
Bring redesigns to market via multiple release stages – first internal beta, then early access, and finally GA.
Research Metrics & Methodology
7
rounds of research
With an early emphasis on Voice of Customer (VoC) and BI, mid-cycle focusing on prototype testing, and testing early access builds later in product development
188
participants
From a wide variety of product experience levels and customer archetypes – collaborators, builders, and product admins & consultants all gave us valuable feedback.
∞
design concepts
Extensive conceptual design work covering IA, interaction design, and visual fit and finish guided us to an elegant and flexible solution.
Toolbar
Research Discoveries
“The different buttons are just a mess right now and not in any order”
– Customer feedback on legacy toolbar
Too many things
With over 50 buttons available at all times, customers told us loud and clear that we were overwhelming with options.
No clear narrative
Customers didn't see the toolbar as organized in any discernible order – they learned where items were via rote memorization
Poor icon recognition
Testing unlabelled icon-only buttons versus labelled buttons, recognition and recall was far better with labels.
Where customers had task flows that were point-in-time and involved a focused 'work mode', there were opportunity to consolidate controls.
A key example was formatting controls moving to a drawer that could be expanded or contracted, drastically reducing control ribbon complexity.
Putting controls that acted in similar ways together was common sense – but scaling 'common sense' across dozens and dozens of controls required thought, research, and narrative construction.
Universally recognizable icons are hard – especially across a large, often non-technical customer base. As a result, most controls got an icon plus a label for maximum recognition.
Just a few exceptions existed in final designs – like undo/redo, search, and settings.
“I like it – it's very clear, it doesn't look very jumbled. There are various icons but they aren't in your face and there's not too many of them so it's not a very cluttered screen”
– Customer feedback on improved toolbar
Find Tool
Research Discoveries
“The simplest function of Find and Replace is a terrible user experience… whether I search something that jumps me across the document or just a few rows away, it's a scavenger hunt to figure out where the one selected cell is to see where that search term was found”
– Customer feedback on legacy Find tool
The legacy Find tool provided no match highlighting on the work surface, making matches difficult to discern from other content
Within the legacy tool, no count of matching results was available – key data for taking action on data or finding insight.
The legacy tool was only discoverable for users who knew the key command, despite the high value a search feature has.
New Find Tool Improvements
Simple improvements like highlighting results in a high-contrast, industry-standard shade yielded significant usability improvements.
Providing a match count (that's dynamic as data shifts live) added additional value, especially at scale.
A net-new feature, reducing the rows shown to only those that match a Find query is a powerful checkbox that let customers use the tool as an on-the-fly filtering mechanism.
Since implementation, some customers have observed they can run whole meetings via just this feature.
Alongside engineering, I helped ensure the tool had consistent behavior at million-plus cell scale as query times stretched out.
We built in smart behaviors like paginated results that still allow match navigation, and clear loading affordances for clarity.
“Oh, I love this, I would say it's definitely a 5/5. It's a feature of other programs (competitors) that I've wished had more to it”
“This will be VERY helpful to extract one element from a project plan”
“That highlight toggle [Show Only Matching Rows] is brilliant!"
– Customer feedback on redesigned Find tool
Filter
– Customer feedback on legacy Filter experience
No 'quick' option
Customers complained about the inability to quickly add a filter criteria – and the laborious process of crafting criteria.
Bloated lists of 'saved' filters
Because customer's only option to add criteria involved saving a new filter, many had long lists of rarely used – and unorganized – filters.
Not intuitive for newer users
For novice users – or just those acclimated to easier interactions – the "column / operator / criteria" query format was overkill.
New Filter Tool Improvements
The largest change to Smartsheet's model of filtering since day one – this brought customers the ability to apply filters, get to the right data – and then, if desired, hit save.
Or, take a saved filter, add more criteria, and later choose whether to merge them into the saved filter.
Ad hoc filters are configured via a more intuitive quick selection interface, with a default operator selected that's more-than-likely the opportune choice for the data type
Easy access to – and modification of –previously saved filters
Improved the menu of saved filters to be searchable and sortable, and provided one-click access to modify a saved filter.
Once a saved filter is selected, adding criteria to it is as easy as adding another 'filter chip' – and criteria stack to make saved filters more of a starting point than required stop.
“One of the things that stood out and I really like is the simplicity of it […] because you can slice and dice it in lots of different ways, you can make it more manageable in terms of looking for information or analyzing. And, it's very neat.”
– Customer feedback on improved Filter experience
Formatting Tools
“One of the biggest challenges is being able to see all the information I want to see on the screen"
– Customer feedback on legacy Formatting tools
Filter controls
"Bold" format
"Font size" selector
~40%
~3-4%
~2-3%
Frequency of usage vs other tools
(% of total toolbar clicks)
Across all toolbar feature usage, only a small portion of formatting controls saw frequent engagement – essentially, changing highlight color was the only popular action across all users.
Create sheet data and structure
Apply formatting en masse – often at full column level or based on item hierarchy
Continue sheet editing
For customers who did utilize the tools in-depth, we observed it was often as part of an end-to-end task – e.g., "I need to clean up my sheet formatting" or "I need to format multiple cells"
Many formatting options were truncated at common viewport widths – or pushed other controls off screen that were more commonly used or had higher business value.
After extensive experimentation and testing of form factors, we found a simple drawer containment offered a mix of persistence (can stay open), progressive disclosure (not open when you don't need it) and familiarity (e.g., ribbon in Office)
Placing the tools in a more standard layout and providing accelerators for common key actions like bumping font size up a point or two
“It's pretty sleek. It's much more modern"
– Customer feedback on improved Formatting tools
Lessons Learned
Building 'universal tools' while still innovating
Tools that everyone can use – or could easily learn to – require pattern matching, familiarity, and adherence to best practices and industry standards. But building new and improved features often means thinking outside the box a bit. Choosing the right universal patterns, meeting a range of user experience levels, and crafting something innovative simultaneously took thoughtful effort.
Charting a path between forces pulling in different directions
I learned about striking a delicate balance – between designing familiar and intuitive controls that align with human factors and UX principles, meeting customer expectations to minimize relearning and avoid disruptions, and fulfilling a business imperative to deliver innovative, forward-thinking control forms that unlock new capabilities.
"Connected but separate" project work streams
While I was responsible for owning UX design across many of the core tools (like Filter, Find, and Sort) and the toolbar itself, these features were not part of a unified end-to-end project or singular PM ownership. That meant I took special care and effort to align the design decision making and facilitate collaboration.