Jira 2025 Changes - How User Experience has degraded ? Is Atlassian ignoring User feedback ?

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

Below is a Summary of chatter between power users and communities as summarized with help of AI and additionally added comments from self. 

• Drastic UI/UX Changes: The new navigation interface (rolled out throughout 2025) has been heavily criticized for being chaotic, reducing efficiency, and forcing more clicks to perform daily tasks. Users have reported that key functions are buried, and the new sidebar is cramped, prompting complaints that it is a "colossal failure on every level" for experienced users.
• Forced Migration and "Space" Terminology: Atlassian is forcing users onto the Cloud, and in late 2025, began rebranding "Jira Projects" to "Jira Spaces," a structural change that has created confusion and resistance among teams accustomed to traditional project terminology.
• Reduced Admin Control and Visibility: Changes in July 2025 removed the "trusted user role" and altered how administrators manage permissions, creating hurdles for complex, heavily tailored instances. 

The Rethink among customers about the usage of the product itself - Large corporations and company users are most affected:
Overall with Less efficient user interface has driven users to look for alternatives for the first time in years, particularly after reports that Atlassian ignored feedback regarding the UI redesign. While some argue the new UI is better for new users, the consensus among power users and admins is that it is a regression in functionality  - Can this be rectified by Atlassian for better Enterprise grade users ? 

Please like , subscribe and promote, and comment for Jira - Product designers and UX designers and relevant management to get this feedback and address this deterioration of User Experience and usability - Otherwise Jira may become "it was once great back in time" tool gone unusable over time.  

[John Funk]

Hi Shanmuga - While some of your points are valid, The move of the Status field was the point most people complained about with the UI changes, and they was rolled back several weeks ago. 

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

Thanks much for the acknowledgement and comment @John Funk , the status field was a change that we could live with,

the confusion that is getting created between what is a Jira Software Space vs what is a Confluence Space vs what is a Jira Projects which is being used for goals i believe is overwhelming for many of the non technical users - i have tried to champion the use of Jira within my company , but with this dizzying pace of user experience changes and terminology changes is causing distrust of the platform itself for many of my endusers.

If jira wanted to create a grouping of different projects and products like confluence a team or workspace user may want to align together they could have created a additional layer of "Spaces" at parent level grouping for Jira Software projects and Confluence spaces and any other atlassian products in use at that "Spaces" - Workspace level , which would have atleast made sense for me to convey to the end users how to read this.

The abrupt forced change of Jira Software "Projects" - "Spaces" is so very confusing and has been causing enormous distrust among users creating pain for anyone who is looking to promote Jira usage in large corporations 

[Matt Smith]

I stated the confusion would arise when it was proposed !

I maintain that these changes are AI driven decisions and not being human sanitised before implementation !

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

quite possible.. just that we cant be the testers of such experiments :( 

[Jens Schumacher]

Those changes have been considered for a long time. Look through the forum and you’ll see how much confusion the term Project has caused over the years. It was just really hard to find another name. 

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

almost every other agile management systems still continue to use Projects in a meaningful way, as i mentioned elsewhere if a different layer of grouping is needed , one could have very well went with terminology and layer above projects like "Workspace", "TeamSpace", ProjectSpace, and let the existing projects remain without being touched so that exisiting users and workflows would have a smoother way to adopt to those. 

May be add additional layers like BusinessUnit, WorkGroup, BusinessSpace,  there are Six Sigma and Scaled Agile common terminologies that Atlassian could have referred back to change to if at all standardization and opening up for more industries was the intent. 

None of that appeared to have happened.  

Its not just this Projects - Space confusion , this creates so much confusion in large scale projects and set workflows and constantly is making end users to learn new navigation and terminologies at the whims of Atlassian is detrimental to say the least.  Teams and projects would like to focus on their own business value products and certainly wont enjoy a bloated tracking software getting in their way. 

[aradu]

Jira Projects / Spaces have long been used different for different teams and customers within Jira. For some they mean a concrete project with a given start and end date with concrete coutcomes, for others they mean a team, department, or in some cases even their customers. The biggest benefit of Jira is that it can fit whatever your business requires.

With the advent of projects in compass and more integration with projects in Jira, keeping the name will simply lead to more confusion. The changing of the name from project to space is a realignment of how everyone uses the concept.

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

@aradu , I appreciate the insight and response. 

As i had mentioned in one of the earlier comments, if the intent was to differentiate how each team used it, to identify and group different type of erstwhile atllassian products or boards or roadmaps used by a team, it would have been far less confusing to existing systems, if a new layer of lets category like "works-space" or "team-space" under which Jira Software - Project, Confluence Pages, JSM queues, and whatever else like compass or goals or whatever the name of choice now , it would have been even more beneficial to add layers of logical grouping to represent the business unit or sub business unit each of this "work-space" or "team-space" or "space" belongs to. 

The choice of assumption that "everyone" understood projects as spaces appears to be source of confusion in the design approach. 

If different set of users are interpreting differently, with my limited knowledge , humbly my assumption would have been teams would look atleast change to closely mirror lets say may be PMP structure, or a Scrum Agile teams structure or a Scaled Agile SaFe framework of grouping structure etc. which i think would have made Jira useful for far more teams and create a better standard of adoption.  

[aradu]

Adding in layers over project would increase the confusion because you'd then have to deal with the changes in configuration association. Currently you associate the configuration (e.g. workflows, fields, work types, ...) with the jira project itself. Adding a layer above would mean either migrating the configuration association to be done with this new level (which is what we have with a rename, but costs a lot more and creates a much longer change window for our customers to feel the pain during), have no configuration association with this new level (which doesn't align with how our customers use "spaces", meaning our changes don't suit the needs of the customer), or have some form of inheritance (which adds a net new concept to an already complicated space).

The assumption was and is less one of "everyone" understanding projects as spaces, but rather one of a space with a single project in it is still a valid space. Thus broadening and re-aligning the effective work item container with a more general set of use cases, and simplifying the language used.

[Suzie Ahlers]

Hi @Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai

I want to make sure you've seen and signed up for the research study about the UI experience. It's an online survey and will go directly to the team responsible for design. I think it would be great for your thoughts on this to be documented and shared directly with that team, versus just on the Community.

Thank you for your feedback and consideration!

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

@Suzie Ahlers , thanks much for the acknowledgement and guidance, will provide the same feedback in the research study area as suggested above.  So far as a power user and who wanted to recommend atlassian products within our organization for better agile management , the dizzying pace of structure changes and so narrowed interpretation has essentially at this point broken the trust of stability and reliability of the platform for long term continuity of teams to manage their workloads using atlassian jira products. 

[alexander]

Hi Suzie — why not just get this information from the Community itself instead of running studies that 80% of your customers will never attend? I’m curious: what happened to such a great Atlassian company, and how did it turn into a bureaucracy machine? ;)

[Matthew Chapman]

Hi Shanmuga, I have to say the navigation interface is a complete disaster for frequent screen changes, and a massive step backwards for heavy users, takes up more real estate and disrupts the flow of your work.

I have no idea as to how this was considered a benefit to users over and above many older outstanding feature requests in cloud. 

I ended up ignoring the new menu and setting up a collection of most frequently used screens in my browser which I can open and flick between as I need. I use the menu as a last resort only. 

Thank for raising,

[Chris]

Well, it's not only UI changing, but usually, Atlassian provides new feature that only cover 80% of a use case. (introduction of Teams and not being able to use them in JQL or the email log - just to mention two of them)

The longer I have to work with Atlassian cloud products, the more I am against cloud solutions in general. I hate to be alpha tester - and having to pay for it.

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

100% agreed , broken things are everywhere at this point .

I dont see the point of Advanced Roadmaps changing to Plans , - unusable , requires so much query creation to even get basic useful view it goes against the usability of the product 

Teams , yes, i dont see the point of it, when its extension is limited to old goals alone and now misplaced Team projects - its an orphan hanging there not knowing what its purpose any more now. 

the marketplace apps management - the whole navigation is so much confusing and counter intuitive that it needs a matrix to know where is what 

its frustrating ,  at a corporate level, we want to focus on developing products that add value to our business interests, if i have to ask my users to learn a new navigation and terminology every quarter or every month for a work item tracking tool.. its a colossal waste of time and i as a admin who would recommend this tool would be ridiculed max. 

[s_gridnevskii]

I worked actively with Data Center and after migration to Cloud I noticed that atlassian-hosted Jira works almost 50% slower than self hosted solution on a cheap AWS server. In addition we have downtimes, not often, but they happen. We are on the other side of the globe and they prefer not to update Jira during USA working hours, so we get them when it is night in USA. 

[michelle_bachmann]

Things 'go missing' all the time with what seems like continuous interface changes and tweaks. It's extremely embarrassing as an administrator to have to apologize for delays since I have look for items in new locations on a regular basis. To combat this, I have created a list of URL shortcuts to find things that I reference frequently since navigating to them has become futile. 

The 'new features' announcements are also now something I dread. I am always left to wonder...

• If or how does it even apply to our license level?
• How accurate is the guestimate of when it may show up for our users in our instance?
• What got moved and where do I have to go to find it now?

I have been administering Jira since 2012. I long for Jira Server to make a come back. It was a time when we could control what and when the features would be upgraded, and on a regular cadence. I have tried to participate in as many evaluations and feedback sessions. However, there are fewer admins than end users. We aren't being heard. PERIOD.

[michelle_bachmann]

Anyone noticed that even the recommended training courses still a variety of terms and NONE list spaces. 'Projects' all the way! 

And as long as we are talking about strange things that Atlassian pushes to customers, but doesn't adopt themselves...what about their JAC instance? https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/BrowseProjects.jspa

[alexander]

Wow — I hadn’t noticed that; I’m really curious. Now, seeing their JAC instance, I feel nostalgic for how well it worked before. The new Jira interface feels clunky and less intuitive.