Smartsheet Responds To Visual Work Demands With Card View

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Latest innovation enables teams across the organization to deliver their best work.

It’s been said a picture is worth a thousand words. While this can be applied to many facets of life, it holds especially true in the modern workplace in which Millennials dominate and research shows visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in brain than text.

Evidence shows visuals are becoming a fundamental element of collaborative work and the way people work is transitioning away from a one-size-fits-all mindset into a more flexible, work-the-way-you-want mentality. Organizations now must recognize the need for visual, agile-like tools to fulfil the needs of their employees.

According to a Smartsheet Work Visualization survey, nearly two-thirds of business professionals — leaders, executive decision makers, and IT staff — prefer using Kanban and/or task boards in the workplace. Several suppliers of project management tools have also entered the marketplace with standalone features like Trello and Microsoft Planner that aim to leverage this visual approach.

To that end, Smartsheet announced the release of Card View, a way to manage work in a highly-visual way. “It’s all about that shared prioritization, which is virtually impossible to see in a spreadsheet,” Robin Sherwood, director of product management at Smartsheet, told GeekWire. “Card View gives you a really good way to notice where bottlenecks might be in your process because things aren’t moving out of that phase.”

Card View provides a new way to see, share, and act on work. Card View provides multiple views into work product and delivers process-centric capabilities including conditional logic and support for calculations.

“Our customers — especially enterprise customers — voiced their desire for a solution that offers the opportunity to work and collaborate in more visual ways,” said Mark Mader, president and CEO of Smartsheet. “Modern collaboration for teams requires multiple intuitive approaches that meet the preferences of different teams and individuals to accelerate project and process success.”