Seeking product admins and end-users for research to improve Atlassian’s sidebar navigation

[#1]

Hi everyone,

The Atlassian navigation team is continually working to make navigation simpler and more intuitive. Your insights have shaped our work so far, and we’d love to hear from you again.

What’s this study about?

We’ve been exploring new concepts to address one of the top navigational challenges we’ve heard from you: The ability to further customise the sidebar to improve focus, and reduce clutter.

In this study, we’ll share clickable prototypes that show early concepts (not final designs) and ask you to complete tasks. Your feedback will help us test usability and see how these ideas fit into your workflows.

What’s involved?

• We’ll conduct an hour-long session (with video and screen share) where we’ll show you designs and prototypes. You can participate from anywhere.
• In this session, we’ll ask you to complete tasks on clickable prototypes so we understand how our improvements fit with your workflows.
• As a token of appreciation for your time, we’ll send you an e-gift card worth $100 USD for this session.

Who are we looking for?

We’re looking for both product/app admins and end-users (non-admins) who:

• Are comfortable with video, audio, and screen sharing.

• Are regular users of Jira.

• Are regular users of Confluence.
  
  

If you want to participate and believe you’re a good fit for this research study, please use the link below to sign up.

➡️ Sign up

If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this post. We look forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,
The Atlassian navigation team

[James Rickards _SN_]

I don't have time for a full hour, but here are my top three issues that really bug me:

1.) The lack of chevrons in the side bar. Please add them so it is consistent with the Confluence page navigation.  It makes it so much easier to navigate a side bar, especially when you have several levels to expand like in JSM. It will also give you a more consistent view.

2.) Please add more levels of navigation to the side bar in JS. It is annoying and slow to have to open a project which takes you to the default view of a board, to then move the mouse all the way up to the horizontal navigation bar to select the view you actually want.  This is inconsistent with JSM where I can expand out the menu and navigate directly to the Queue I want. 

3.) Please keep the Status button in a consistent location between JSM and Jira Software.

Having to toggle between these inconsistencies is very annoying and I can't build up a muscle memory to get things done fast as I need to constantly adjust my thinking depending on the product.  Which is the opposite of "making things consistent" that was promised with the new navigation.

I like Atlassian as I don't want to be annoyed and frustrated, but if I'm going to be annoyed and frustrated anyway, I might as well just stick to the Microsoft eco system.

I have received similar feedback from the users I respresent.

[Stefan Tichelaar]

Our company use many projects, but only a few of them are in scope for any given user, so now that same user is going to see tons of projects on the left side bar instead of seeing the actually useful information that was there before the navigation bar changes. 

Moving all of the left-side information to the top horizontal is awful. They rarely change projects every day, they do use the menu to navigate between board, list, calendar, release etc a lot. 

Also In project scope information is hard to find. e.g. when opening the board I get the top menu with navigation, but when an issue page is open (you know like users tend to do and actually use), the topbar is gone and I can not switch to e.g. Releases pages quickly. No they first need to navigate to the kanban board again. This is annoying to long term users but down right confusing to new users.   

The old side bar was way more useful to provide project scope. My teams need to see a board, list, calendar, release at hand or quickly find issues, not change projects all day long.  

[Andrei Eleodor Sirbu]

Hello, here's my honest opinion as an admin for a large Jira instance. 
Customization is a nice addition but as an organisation grows you need to standardize the tools you're using for project management. If everyone customizes their navigation bars, and plans, and boards and virtually any artifact Jira has I can't make tutorials anymore. Because the screens I'll show in my tutorials will be different from what people will have on their own account. 

Atlassian's focus should be on great UX experience with standardized locked artifacts and it should be the norm. If a Jira admin wants to allow customization, it should be optionnal, activated via a button by organisation admins. 

Otherwise we're constantly adding rules of usage upon rules of usage, and automations to parry this particular behavior which bypasses our general rules of practice, and when automations don't handle extreme cases we have to resort to extra plugins and it means extra costs. 

Because aligning teams also means to align the practices of these teams and a standardized tool is supposed to help just to do that. 

Kind regards