SmartSheet Form Builder Redesign

SmartSheet engaged INNOV8 to lead the redesign of the SmartSheet Form Builder — the product surface that lets SmartSheet users create and publish data-collection forms from within the platform. The Form Builder is a core workflow tool used by enterprise teams across thousands of organizations; any redesign had to maintain full backward compatibility with existing customer forms while modernizing the architecture and expanding the accessibility and localization posture.

Architecture

The redesign was architected as a micro-frontend — a self-contained React application with its own state management, component library, and test suite, integrated into the larger SmartSheet platform via a defined API boundary. This isolation meant the Form Builder could be developed, tested, and deployed independently without coordinating release cycles with the broader platform.

The stack: TypeScript + React + Redux Toolkit for the application layer, Emotion for component-scoped styling. Storybook served as the component development environment and visual documentation system — every UI component was developed in Storybook first, with stories covering default states, edge cases, and accessibility variants before integration into the application. Playwright drove the end-to-end test suite.

Quality and compliance

The Form Builder shipped with 95%+ test coverage across unit and end-to-end tests. Localization was designed in from the architecture review — string externalization, RTL layout considerations, and locale-aware formatting — rather than retrofitted after the fact. ADA compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA) was verified throughout the build: keyboard navigation, focus management across modal and panel interactions, ARIA roles on the drag-and-drop form field ordering surface, and screen-reader-compatible error states on field validation.

SmartSheet’s Form Builder serves enterprise customers whose own accessibility obligations downstream make the hosting platform’s compliance non-optional. The ADA posture here wasn’t checkbox compliance — it was a contractual requirement for SmartSheet’s enterprise sales motion.