🎄Postcard for UI Redesign Trauma: How Jira’s Change Broke Our Muscle Memory (and We Survived It)

[#1]

SaaSJet Advent Calendar — The Postcards We Never Sent

Welcome to another day in the SaaSJet Advent Calendar — the one where we unwrap something far more chaotic than a Christmas sweater:
🎄 Jira’s 2025 UI Redesign 🎄

Because nothing says holiday spirit like your entire navigation disappearing the moment you need it.

This year, Jira gave the community a gift nobody asked Santa for:
A shiny new interface that accidentally launched the Annual Jira Hide-and-Seek Championship.

Let’s relive the highlights — with hot cocoa in hand — of everything users genuinely couldn’t find.

🔍 Dashboards & Filters

Merged into one toolbar.
Not moveable. Not sortable. Not removable.
Truly the fruitcake of UI decisions: traditional, dense, and nobody quite knows what to do with it.

📁 Project Navigation

The left sidebar has become the Grinch:
Sometimes it shows up.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes it steals menu items.

Reports? Available.
Releases? Maybe.
Archived items? Don’t push your luck.

⚙️ Settings & Configuration

New UI. New names. New locations.
Old documentation.

Admins wandered the menus like carolers who forgot the lyrics.

“Project Settings?”
“Do you mean Space Settings?”
“Do I mean that? I don’t know anymore.”

🔍 Advanced Search

JQL now hides behind the mysterious link:
✨ View all work items ✨
Because nothing screams “Advanced Search” like… not saying “search.”

Even 10-year Jira veterans needed a moment of holiday reflection.

📅 Board / List / Calendar

Once comfortably in the sidebar — now moved to the top bar.

It’s like when someone moves the star on the tree and insists it “looks better there.”

Sure… but now you click the wrong spot every. single. time.

🎧 Service Desk Queues

A festive new journey:
Space → Expand Queues → Scroll → More → Oh, there it is 🎁

Support agents did not sing Christmas carols about this one.

🗂️ Project Menu Items

Fewer items fit on the screen now.
Everything else goes to the More menu.

It’s like stuffing half the ornaments on the back of the tree and hoping nobody notices.

🏃‍♂️ Sprint Details

Gone.
A holiday mystery.
Possibly stolen by the Elf on the Shelf.

Agile teams everywhere felt a disturbance in the force.

and 40+ more problems solved this year

🎄 Final Thoughts — And Why This Became an Advent Postcard

The truth is: the redesign is cleaner, brighter, and ready for the future.
But the transition?
A shared community trauma wrapped in blue UI and tied with a ribbon of “Where is that?” The redesign may have been tough, but it gave the community:

• New memes

• New inside jokes

• 40+ Community threads of shared confusion

• A collective experience to bond over

And that’s why this Advent Calendar exists:

To celebrate the chaos, the learning, the laughter, and the community that makes every Jira change survivable — together.

Happy holidays from the SaaSJet team 🎄
May your buttons stay where you left them.

[Debbie Jolley]

You missed a chance for an unsubtle dig about the Status button moves LOL

Good, lighthearted, summary of the other changes tho :-)

[bmccarthy]

You forgot to mention the Epics panel that now needs to be enabled/disabled.   Why not just leave it enabled like it used to be?  

[Rob]

Keeps us young, though!

Oh, and agile.