Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: January 21, 2025
Smartsheet’s 2024 Product Experience Direction focuses on delivering a modern, solution-centric platform with intuitive tools and scalable designs. The updates focus on collaboration, real-time updates, and an aesthetic refresh to improve work management for businesses of all sizes.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Smartsheet’s 2024 Product Experience Direction, featuring intuitive tools and scalable designs.
- Key updates to the product, including the Solution Container, enhanced navigation, and refreshed visuals.
- The Ursa Design System’s role in ensuring consistency, accessibility, and adaptability.
- Smartsheet’s strategic positioning in a competitive market, addressing enterprise needs.
The News: Smartsheet has unveiled its 2024 Product Experience Direction, designed to provide a modern, solution-oriented platform that emphasizes usability, scalability, and seamless collaboration. Key updates include a refreshed color palette, streamlined iconography, and an innovative solution container to simplify navigation and enhance overall productivity. Additionally, new features, such as an upgraded filter drawer and improved hierarchy management, aim to optimize workflow efficiency and support more effective data organization.
Smartsheet’s 2024 Product Design: Elevating UX to Meet Modern Business Needs
Analyst Take: Smartsheet is a leading vendor in the work management market, with a user base of more than 13 million professionals and a customer roster that includes 85% of the Fortune 500. Smartsheet’s platform is designed to let users track tasks in spreadsheet-style grids or timeline views, making it easy to customize workflows to meet specific needs. With no-code automation, Smartsheet helps businesses streamline everything from simple tasks to complex processes with ease.
Smartsheet has unveiled its 2024 product strategy, which focuses on transforming how teams collaborate, guided by user-centric principles. The updates aim to create a platform that is designed to be intuitive, inclusive, and scalable, and capable of handling the challenges of modern work management.
A Product Built on Strong Foundations
Smartsheet’s newest enhancements are grounded in six core principles: inclusivity, usefulness, intuitiveness, system coherence, scalability, and aesthetic refinement. These pillars ensure the platform serves a diverse range of users while maintaining a seamless and easy-to-use interface. By prioritizing inclusivity, Smartsheet tackles ongoing accessibility challenges head-on. Meanwhile, the Ursa Design System brings a unified framework to the platform, ensuring a consistent and polished user experience across every feature.
Notable Enhancements for Smarter Workflows
Smartsheet’s 2024 product roadmap reinforces its commitment to delivering meaningful updates that meet user needs. One of the standout features is the Solution Container, a powerful enhancement that brings workspaces and portfolios into one central hub. This makes it easier for users to manage complex projects while staying focused on critical details.
The platform also debuts a refreshed visual design featuring updated colors and simplified icons for better clarity. Navigation has been streamlined with unified toolbars and scalable zones, making the overall user experience smoother and more intuitive. Additionally, the rollout of new table, timeline, and board views offers greater flexibility, allowing users to tailor workflows to their specific needs. These innovations are particularly valuable for enterprise clients, who require robust, customizable tools to efficiently manage intricate processes.
Ursa Design System: The Backbone of Change
The Ursa Design System marks a major step forward in Smartsheet’s design evolution, building on the foundation laid by its predecessor, Lodestar. While Lodestar brought in initial design cohesion, it faced challenges in standardization and adoption. Ursa addresses these gaps by centralizing design elements and leveraging styling tokens, enabling developers to implement updates more efficiently while also ensuring compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Ursa’s modern framework also gives Smartsheet the agility to adapt quickly to market demands, keeping it competitive with other industry leaders. With its focus on scalability, accessibility, and a seamless user experience, Ursa positions Smartsheet as a forward-thinking leader in collaborative work management.
Competitive Positioning in a Crowded Market
Smartsheet’s latest updates go far beyond just a fresh look – it is a strategic move to stay ahead of competitors such as Asana, Monday.com, and Microsoft Project. By focusing on scalable workflows and solutions crafted for enterprise use, Smartsheet is bolstering its position as a leader in the collaborative software market.
The platform’s ability to meet the unique needs of industries such as manufacturing and healthcare – where compliance and structured workflows are absolutely essential – further showcases its adaptability and powerful functionality.
However, Smartsheet will need to ensure that its platform is able to keep pace with the rest of the market, in terms of leveraging AI to go beyond automating basic or repetitive tasks, as worker efficiency and productivity remain key performance metrics for nearly all departments. This can include using predictive AI to assess project health and status, as well as more advanced generative capabilities to handle project summarizations, status updates, and streamline complex workflows.
Furthermore, the use of AI agents, which can solve specific problems or tasks without the need for explicit programming, are increasingly being deployed via enterprises. It will be critical for Smartsheet to support integrations with other leading software vendors, including CRM systems, ERP systems, marketing automation software, and data platforms, to ensure that AI agents deployed by these software companies can easily access and act upon data held within Smartsheet. As AI agents become commonplace, this ability to interact and play nicely with other vendors will be critical to the company’s ability to maintain its position within the enterprise tech stack.
What to Watch:
- The impact of Smartsheet’s 2024 updates on user retention and acquisition, particularly among enterprise clients seeking robust, customizable tools.
- Smartsheet’s ability to differentiate itself further in a competitive market that is contested by players such as Asana, Monday.com, and Microsoft Project.
- Smartsheet’s progress around incorporating and implementing internal AI capabilities, as well as integrating with external AI tools and agents.
- Adoption trends among enterprise clients, especially in regulated sectors such as healthcare and manufacturing, where compliance and scalability are critical.
- Long-term performance metrics tied to the new features, particularly in improving collaboration and productivity benchmarks for enterprise teams.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
