R&R (no, not Rest and Recreation)

When shopping online, have you seen the ‘Click to See Price. Too Low to Show!’ links? Some may enjoy that shopping experience, others (me included) find this extra step a bit annoying. Display the price and don’t extend the time it takes me to purchase something online.

It’s remarkable that many e-commerce, social networking and SaaS players don’t honor the two R’s – Respect and Relevance. Respect people’s time and maintain a high degree of relevance in what users view online and in e-mail correspondence. Even megalith sites like Facebook can be slow to learn such lessons. Remember how long it took them to embrace the idea of including message content in notification e-mails vs. irritating users by requiring them to sign in to view a message? I can understand why Facebook stuck to its initial position. “If we force people to sign in to read their mail, we’ll get more page views - great!” If they had known that people might enjoy using their service more by delivering relevance content in e-mail notifications…they might have acted sooner. In my opinion, the relatively simple change transformed Facebook e-mails from annoying clutter to conveying what I wanted to know.

Saving people time – even a few seconds on repetitive tasks, can mean the difference between value-add and a costly interrupt. One of the initial design principles for Smartsheet was to let people to save time through productivity enhancing features – date-aware highlighting of changes to a sheet, one-click access to cell level history, and flexible, content rich, e-mail alerts and notifications.

The research that is being applied to our current design and development effort spans the activities of 26,000 teams and includes lessons we have learned in observing what is most important to users in getting work done. While we were pleased with our current product offering, we look forward to the improvements coming in Q2. Some changes will deliver massive savings for people…others are quite minor. Combined, the result is significant. Rather than succumb to the temptation of overloading the service with 27 new features that only a fraction of the user base utilizes, the changes will benefit the entire Smartsheet population. Similar to the e-commerce sites that leave you feeling like you found a great product at a competitive price with a hassle-free checkout process; we aim to deliver an equally satisfying experience with Smartsheet.