🎉 Your help center navigation is now customizable!

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community!

I’m excited to share an important update about the next step in our journey to unlock more customization capabilities in the JSM Help Center.

We have separated the Help Center navigation from the banner, paving the way for new and exciting features. This means you can now independently customize the background and text color of your navigation, separate from the banner.

Before

After

Steps to customize the navigation:

1. Go to the Help Center of your choice.

2. Select Customize, and then Customize look and feel from the navaigation.

3. Scroll down the side panel to find the new settings for customizing your navigation background and text color.

4. Choose your preferred background color and text color for the navigation.

5. Select Save changes.

Why customize your navigation now?

We are rolling out this change alongside several other improvements to Help Center customization capabilities. Once the rollout is complete, every Help Center will feature navigation that is distinct from the banner.

For users who have not customized their navigation background and text color by that time, the new default navigation background will be set to white and the navigation color will be set to black.

If you have adjusted your logos or banner text colors to align with your current Help Center banner background, we encourage you to review these settings and make any necessary updates.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this new functionality! Please share your questions, feedback, or suggestions in the comments below.

[Patrick van der Rijst]

First of all, I’m glad to see more customization options available. However, we were previously promised a fully HTML/CSS configurable Help Center during a past Team event. I even saw it mentioned again in one of the JSM-specific talks at the last Team event, but I haven’t been able to find any information on it anywhere.

[Susan Waldrip]

Hi @Raafi Mohammed , thanks for the update on this. Will this be available for all plans, or just Premium and Enterprise?

[Raafi Mohammed]

@Patrick van der Rijst Thank you for your comment. Just checking if you're across our December update regarding the Help Center's Home Page? 🧑🏻‍🎨 🎨 NEW capabilities to help you customize your Help Centers!

In addition to that, I have news! This week we're also launching an Early Access Program for wider customization across the Help Center: piloting the ability to create multiple customizable Landing pages inside the Help Center, which are powered by the rich text editor. Please reach out to me at mraafi@atlassian.com to be included in the EAP.

Also, if you'd like to share, I'd love to hear more about your specific customization needs on mraafi@atlassian.com

Thank you,
Raafi Mohammed
Senior Product Manager
Jira Service Management

[Patrick van der Rijst]

Hi @Raafi Mohammed 

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK631uNNez0 at around ~ 30 min. In one of the presentations of Shihab Hamid on last years Teams in Barcelona it was mentioned as well, but I'm unable to find that session online.

[Raafi Mohammed]

@Susan Waldrip Happy to share that this is 100% rolling out to all plans including Standard and Free too! 😃

[Ralf Scheller]

Hello - is it possivle to change the Size of the Banner on Top of the Help Center?

Some customers and Agents immediately told us, that this is wasted Space.
Before changing this behaviour, the Content of the HelpCenter was displayed as "overlay" in front of the Banner

Before:

Now:

[Dexia O_Shea]

is it possible to switch it back to the original version?

[Gabriel Lences]

Same question as @Ralf Scheller and @Dexia O_Shea 

[Tyler Dobie]

Hi ... I need to know what resolution it wants for the banner image.

[Jenifer Piris]

Hi! Can i customize the banner of each portal?

[Nick Wade -Opus Guard-]

Well this just broke some carefully aligned branding across our properties. These are breaking changes that currently cannot seemingly be undone. While we applaud brining more customizability to JSM portals, this is bad practice.

Notes for you: 

1. The portal home Help Center banner is now bounded by white negative space. This is quite jarring in visual comparison to our website and other properties (as you can see above in before and after) which we'd CAREFULLY ALIGNED visually to help customers understand they are still in the right places. I don't mind having a banner per group page in future. Making it the same today has broken our brand visual in JSM for now. 
2. The banner does not seem to accept and properly display a gradient (top to bottom) image, this might be related to need to know the native or proper resolution, perhaps it is scaling inappropriately for display? (see https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Service-Management-articles/Your-help-center-navigation-is-now-customizable/bc-p/2983440#M5853 )
3. Can I get in the Early Access ASAP? https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Service-Management-articles/Your-help-center-navigation-is-now-customizable/bc-p/2974228#M5779 
4. Meantime, can we revert back to what it was 15 minutes ago? 

[Timbo]

We need to be able to remove the banner. It is huge!

Also, articles are now double-scroll-viewed and horrible to read. Scrolling the page with the mouse scrolls the 'main page' and not the article. But to properly read the article you need to scroll both because of the gigantic header :) 

Please let us reverse this, or atleast let us remove the banner and fix the nested scroll issue.

[Timbo]

This interaction must be an actual joke haha😆 We are one day away from April fools after all! 🫡

My browser is full screen on my laptop. I am not playing it up. I can't read the article without constantly double scrolling because the article contents within the nested scroll are taller than my screen height. I need to scroll the parent scroll to read. lol. 

https://imgur.com/YJWA5tO

[Valerie Vliegen]

Is it possible to switch back? Because now our banner is completely wrong. Plus, you have waisted space when you're in the 'raise a request' part.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Raafi Mohammed 

Please say this is not just a April Fools Joke for today as @Timbo mentioned?

It does break some careful branding and makes unneeded space a problem in addition to the scrolling issue as Timbo pointed out too.

I do also think we should have the ability to set the border radius (rounded couners) and the ability to have it full with or not ...

And, I suggest that these all be rather implemented as flags that can be toggled by admins to:

1. implement across the org,
2. implement just for admins or a group or
3. not implement at all. It would make it richer for us.

Don't get me wrong - It is all great that the help centers are getting more customizability and flexibility like this!

Thank you though 

Yatish

[Raafi Mohammed]

Hi Everyone,
Thank you for sharing your feedback regarding this recent update. We recognize your concerns about the height of the banner image, and completely understand how this has affected the user experience for some of you, especially when viewed on smaller screens.

We want to assure you that we are actively working to address this. Our team is committed to refining the design to better meet your needs, while maintaining the customization functionality that we aimed to unlock with this update.

I will update this thread as soon as we have addressed the concern about the height of the banner. 

Thank you for your continued engagement and candid feedback. We really appreciate it.

Warm Regards,
Raafi Mohammed,
Senior Product Manager,
JSM Help Center

[Nick Wade -Opus Guard-]

Thanks @Raafi Mohammed, I know we might come across a bit terse or gruff and want to reiterate that we know you're working to make things better and provide more customization/customizability. I speak for many when I reiterate Patrick's point about that we apreciate your engagement here. 

Best, -nick wade
Co-founder and COO, Opus Guard
keep what you need, remove what you don't

[Raafi Mohammed]

Thank you so much for your kind words @Nick Wade -Opus Guard- . Really appreciate it. I completely understand the expectation.

To address the other point in your previous comment, please try 1920 x 300 and let us know if that helped with the gradient image for the banner.

Also, please sign up here for the EAP for Landing Pages and I will have you added to it!

[Nick Wade -Opus Guard-]

Signed up @Raafi Mohammed. Y'all don't have the new banner in your own JSM, LOL ;) https://earlyaccessprogram.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portals 

At that 1920 x 300 resolution the banner background-image url blob looks much better, I do see the gradient as expected now. 

[JD]

This is an extremely disappointing update and an even more underwhelming product.

The entire portal that Atlassian has delivered is deficient with sub-standard features on a relatively expensive product (JSM).  It is meant to be the front door for all service management - and yet it presents as the most unprofessional, uninviting site.

There is no custom styling, no custom blocks. Nothing. The portal lacks basic features which have been available for well over a decade. 

Customer's are completely unable to create a support site that resembles Atlassian's sales pages or even Atlassian's own support site (https://support.atlassian.com/).  Perhaps Atlassian should eat it's own dog food.

Hopefully this product is prioritised to be fixed soon. It is current in alpha release.

[Milad S_]

Hi @Raafi Mohammed

This is a great step forward. 

I wanna second the above comments by highlighting a couple of tension points with articles at the moment:

• There are two scrollbars when visiting articles, which makes it difficult to scroll
• We have banners on some of our Confluence pages, so we ended up with two banners for those articles in the Help Centre.

Do we need a banner to appear in every article/form within the Help Centre? If yes, why same banner should appear everywhere? I wish this was customisable (perhaps per form/article/portal). That way, users would decide whether to have a banner or not and/or customise banner as needed.

Kind regards,

Milad 

[Tim Posselwhite]

Thanks for the update. Hopefully some more custom html/css will be implemented in the future!

I came to say I was waiting for a "Navigation" update in the help center.

When reading knowledge base article, you cant see the parent of that article nor can you navigate to the other published articles (as a portal customer). I have only found "ugly" solutions with including page tree in every article which feels a bit over the top.

Hopefully we will get an improved navigation for the published KB articles as well :)

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