Epic panel text wrap removal breaks function

[Guy Chapman]

A recent update to the Jira Cloud UI has removed text wrap from the Epic summary (title) that is dislaied in the left-nav, Epic panel that can be enabled in the Backlog area of a board.

This has a significant negative impact on usability - or to put it another way, for Epics with more than a short title, it's totally unusable any more.

Before - Epic title text wrapped in the left panel so it was readable

After - if Epic title is longer than about 21 characters, it is truncated

...sure, we all strive for nice brief Epic titles but there are scenarios where this is not the case, with this new UI change, the function of the Epic Panel is almost completely trashed.

[Tomislav Tobijas]

@Guy Chapman we've just created a new feature request for this > see JRACLOUD-99047: Display full epic summary in the Epic Panel in the backlog section. 👈

[NICOLE NICHTER]

@Tomislav Tobijas Thank you so much for opening an item for this. Several folks in our org have also expressed dissatisfaction with this change. The ticket shows as a "suggestion" and in the backlog. Since this was a recent change that is causing significant friction, should this be prioritized differently/higher?

[Tomislav Tobijas]

@NICOLE NICHTER hmm... maybe. I just reached out to the official support team and they raised the request. 😅

I am not sure how the product team prioritizes stuff in the backlog, but what I could probably say is that I'd recommend voting on this and leaving comment(s) with suggestions.

I just know how to get them to raise a ticket fast (note that I cannot either edit this nor do any changes), everything else is up to official support or the product team.

[Guy Chapman]

Yes, thanks for raising that rerquest @Tomislav Tobijas. It's clearly a regression from a recent release more than a new feature request but whatever works to get the attention of someone behind the Atlassian firewall :-) 

[Guy Chapman]

...the progressive release of this regression continues. Here's a yesterday v today comparison from the same instance. Before on the left (obviously) after on the right.

As a bonus, in addition to the epic-text-nowrap nonsense, the text size of the Epic summary is now smaller than the other incidental items... not to mention (but I am) the general wasted blank space vertically.

[Germán Morales]

Hi @Guy Chapman , welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You're not missing a documented setting. Jira Cloud lets users show or hide the Epic panel, change the backlog density and choose which fields appear on cards, but there is no supported control to restore text wrapping or resize how Epic summaries are displayed in that panel.

For now, expand the Epic and select View details to read the complete summary. Placing a short identifying phrase at the beginning of each Epic summary may reduce the impact, but it is only a workaround for the usability problem shown in your screenshots.

Your before-and-after comparison provides clear evidence for reporting this change. Atlassian's Jira Cloud help guidance recommends submitting unexpected behavior as a bug, or an intentional interface change as a suggestion. I could not find a public ticket for this exact Epic-panel behavior, so include both screenshots, when the change first appeared and confirmation that the same summaries wrapped correctly before the update.