Feedback about degraded user experience and usability of Jira after 2025 Changes

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

With the forced terminology changes of Jira Software Projects to Spaces - Causing enormous confusion among large corporate users who look for stability and standardization in their management tools , how do we get our feedback heard to the Atlassian product designers and User Experience designers ? 

The forced structural change is causing considerable amount of confusion and causing distrust for Atlassian brand itself. 

a possible way to address , from what i could think off without knowing the details of designers have brought about these changes  , 

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 simply 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 

a summarized user community feedback which i have captured in another post related to this as follows

• Drastic UI/UX Changes: The new navigation interface (rolling out May 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 ? 

[高下 智彦_Tomohiko Takashita_ lixiluser]

100% agreed. The Atlassian navigation team needs to swallow their pride, admit this update is a massive blunder, roll back to the old, actually usable UI, and disband entirely.

[Martin Flury]

where is the fire like icon for this statement!!

1000% agreed. 

[Anne Saunders]

🔥

[Joelyn Weeks]

Totally agree.  The design team has not heard us before and do not offer improvements for the negative feedback.  It seems that the design team does not understand the complexities that we use with project management.....they seem to have a one dimensional view for "to do" lists.

It would be nice for them to hold a user (virtual) meeting and let us show how we use it and why we need certain features they have removed or altered in a less than helpful way.

[Anne Saunders]

It took years for similarly pointless/useless/bloated-salary-justification changes to be reversed the last time they did this.

We have to:

1. Keep hope alive.
   
   
2. Like, comment, and share the community posts that question and offer alternatives to the changes that adversely affect your team's workflows and productivity.
   
   
3. Vote for and comment on like-minded requests in JAC  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-97573

I don't have a lot of hope personally, but our leadership team has decided to stay the course with Atlassian, so I'm trying to make the most of an unfortunate situation.

[Mitchell Cardwell]

Keep hope alive? I mean...uh...it's software. The new UI isn't going away, and long-time Atlassian users know this happens every 4-5 years. Time to move on.

[Anne Saunders]

They rolled the 2018 changes back in 2021. 

This is also about a lot more than the UI changes - access to manage the filters and boards (sorry - "views") in JSM, hiding the Boards view for JSW, awkwardly coercing key/type/summary into a single field in search, removing JQL from the All Work view...and ignoring an astonishing number of feature requests in favor of silly UI changes is maddening for admins who have to keep administering the platform.

[Mark B Wager]

AGREED!  I'm honestly confused and bewildered. I have a hard time believing that CUSTOMERS wanted these changes.

The recent changes have all felt FORCED and more about Atlassian roadmaps/priorities than about Customer needs/wants. (This exposes what I suspect is a HUGE gap between Customers and Atlassian usage, needs, wants, and priorities.)

Thank you for opening a door here to allow us (customers) to vent provide feedback. Although, in my experience it will likely not get the needed traction, but I'll continue to hope.

Here's what I think...

1. Most comments, voting, etc. come from ADMINS.
   • This means only a very small subset of users actually provide input.
2. Admins represent a HUGE number of users.
   • We very often pass along feedback from our user base.
   • I represent a medium sized company with ~700 users.
   • When I vote it isn't ONE vote, it represents ~700 votes.
   • If you're an admin of a 5000 users, your ONE vote really represents 5000 votes!
3. Requiring customers to VOTE for features and BUG fixes (shocking, I know), is shockingly inefficient and ineffective.
   • these often have MULTIPLE tickets open.
   • Open OFTEN for YEARS.
   • Votes are spread across many issues, reducing their real voice and impact.
   • Issues are hard to find, so they don't get votes.
   • Many users are like me and have given up on submitting or searching and voting because we're discouraged and hope-less. (Just read the comments on old/open tickets.)
4. Atlassian seems to prioritize NEW features over stability and accurate, reliable, full-functional features.  (Bugs are very obviously prioritized FAR BELOW new features.)
   • PARTIAL. ALMOST. SORT OF. CLOSE. These words best describe the "Apps" (referring to the renamed Atlassian "Products" as Apps, not marketplace "Apps")  The irony of this comment is obvious.
   • I.e., Confluence Server vs Cloud,
   • Confluence "legacy editor",
   • lack of parity in functions as simple as searching. E.g., You can sort in one, but not another. You can search by PROJECT NAME or KEY in Jira, but in Confluence only Space NAME and NOT Key. You get a search box in some admin screens, but not others. You can sort some columns in admin screens, but not other.
   • I could go on and on and on and on...
5. The VERBIAGE changes have been confusing.
   • "Apps" change.
   • "Work" change.
   • "Space" change
   • Etc.
   • These changes up-ended YEARS of commonly used terms which provided important distinction between Jira "projects" and Confluence "Spaces", Apps, products, etc. All of these threw our end-users for a loop.

Ok. I need to be done. I look forward to the fixes and changes and renewed attention by Atlassian that will come as a result of our collective voices.  (I don't mean for this to sound as snarky as it does.) I am trying to remain positive. I really do like Atlassian's products and their support for my problems has been EXCELLENT (shout out to the Support Teams!!)  I will keep hoping for a better future!

Thanks, @Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai for posting this discussion!

—Mark

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

100% agreed Mark, Atlassian used to be my go to Agile platform, now i am constantly looking what other alternatives are there, as the changes appear to be tone deaf for long term regular users and stability of long term users is often thrown out with minimal regard.

Top it with removing onprem datacenter option as well, which have shielded large user bases and set workflows from the whims of disconnected designers, this would be detriment of the product.  

We will continue to look for alternatives and until management also realizes that atlassian changes are overwhelming and getting in the way of their product development instead of facilitating it and allow the tools administrators to move away. 

Thats the gap period atlassian has to fix itself if any meaningful to get any continuous flow of changes. So many of their changes appear to be done in silos and disjointed manner, i dont know if Atlassian have any architectural review at all anymore before their rollout of new features , are they even doing any regression testing ? Appears to be NO. 

Which type of customers are they using for their beta test or feedback if at all any for change and product feedback i do not know. 

[Anne Saunders]

@Mark B Wager your #4. PREACH. (I mean, I agree across the board, but 4. 😭)

[Mitchell Cardwell]

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

― Steve Jobs

[Martin Flury]

@Mark B Wager amen

These five points sum it up perfectly.
These points speak from my heart

I am one hundred percent certain that Atlassian will not realise the second point.

[Mitchell Cardwell]

Of course we all know Atlassian did extensive product planning and testing before rolling this out. It’s Atlassian. What you all seem to fail to realize is you’re in a vocal minority, as their product plans, research and testing bore out this is correct to their product strategy. And that strategy includes the vocal minority bitching and threatening to leave which also happens when they change the radius of button corner.

It’s really hard to argue about a cloud only strategy. We’ve all known this was coming for years. What they’re doing in the cloud cannot be done in data center. data center is no longer fit for purpose.

A unified coherent UI is absolutely necessary to bring all the products and do a single way of working and they chose the best path forward, which was to put it all on the left. There may be things to kvetch about, but this is the MVP and they rolled it and they’re reiterating on it.

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

@Mitchell Cardwell 

If only it was coherent with any of the industry standards, i personally would embrace the change. 

This was supposed to be Agile management tool to my understanding, the issue raised was about a confusing terminology and categorization and not fully implemented change of the terminology. If it was well tested and smoothly implemented everywhere it would have been nice.

As was highlighted in few other areas, the most people who wanted it to be changed to arbitrary use of the term space appears to have been vocal, if that was backed by lets say any of the Agile standards and terminologies from that of Scrum alliance or SaFe Agile. absolutely yes, will happily embrace the change. 

i issue raised was not necessarily about datacenter to cloud , rather is a consequential complaint due to the change implementation approach that has been taken.  

Its ingenius to simplify and group the issue as radius of the button change type complaints-- that appears to be enforcing the same tone deaf approach if atlassian thinks of these feedbacks that way. Certainly not facilitating people who want to promote atlassian

I wish Atlassian product design team is as iconic and visionary as Steve Jobs -- Alas they would like to be.  This product is neither retail , nor the work management customers are willing to be testers for such illusions. 

So yes,  yet it may not happen right away, but people will continue to look for alternatives and jump at convenient time of their fitting. 

[James Rickards _SN_]

I'm sorry, but I do not agree with much of what you've stated. I say this after 20+ years of using the product, and setting up architectures at many organisations, including some with 3000+ users.

The rollout came with plenty of warning (nearly two years of warning for enterprise customers) and a ton of free material that made it easy as an Admin to execute relevant Change Management within our organisation. I did not find this chaotic at all.

The separation of Project from a Space has simplify the design. Consider the scenario where a Project involves a cross functional team and involves work items from several different Jira spaces as each application has its own work-space.

There has been no confusion within our organisation between a space in Jira/JSM and confluence. People just prefix the application they are talking about. e.g. Jira space, or Confluence space.  People just needed to know the why of the change and they accepted it.

The rename of "issue" to "work item" has also simplified discussions, especially as we had a work type of "issue" due to the nature of the work we track.  It has also helped cement Jira as being not just for Software Development, resulting in increased adoption within the business. Once again, people just needed to know the why of the change and they accepted it.

Our non-technical users are loving the new navigation/interface compared to the older one. Especially the updated bulk edit, and changes to make in-line edits in the list view without opening every work item.

I do agree on several points:

- Atlassian should not have separated the UI updates from JQL updates for Jira/JSM Spaces. It is confusing needing to remember to use "project" in JQL when the UI says Space. This should have been delayed until the JQL support was finished.

- Rovo is too in your face.  I want it for inference decisions in Automations (e.g. was this comment just a thanks? If so, don't re-open a resolved JSM request). I don't want it writing summaries of comments without me specifically pressing a button for it to do so.

I conclude by saying:

Those UI changes are absolutely necessary for Atlassian to keep pace with the competition like Monday.com, and ServiceNow.  As a software engineer, I'm fairly confident in saying that we are past the most drastic changes, and they are now at the stage of polishing and fixing defects that have been blocked due to older legacy code.  I don't expect another set of major changes this for at least a decade, but I do expect a bunch of minor changes to address specific and constructive feedback, which this post does not provide.  I can say this as I have been engaged directly several times from product owners over the last 20 years based on my feedback. I've seen them implement several of the feature request I've personally submitted.

[Josh]

@James Rickards _SN_ I can't agree more with you on this one:

- Atlassian should not have separated the UI updates from JQL updates for Jira/JSM Spaces. It is confusing needing to remember to use "project" in JQL when the UI says Space. This should have been delayed until the JQL support was finished.

If Atlassian does not want to "keep hope alive" that there may be a reversion to a prior UI, they need to stop leaving key aspects unfinished. If they're going to change the terminology, change it *everywhere* (including JQL and API calls). Leaving the work half-finished leaves us in the worst possible worlds where there's a lot more ambiguity and confusion.

[Anne Saunders]

@James Rickards _SN_ If we wanted Clickup, we would have subscribed to Clickup. 

The continuing moves to abstract control away from human users in search/filters, the cramming of junk into search (If I wanted a google doc, I'd be looking there), and the focus on glossy cosmetics (cover images and colored backgrounds) while leaving legitimate feature requests in their backlog for years shows how much this modern Atlassian cares about its actual users - which is not much. 

[Joelyn Weeks]

very much agree; and colors, cartoons, graphics, badges are not of interest.  Do need viewer accessibility as noted in WCAG 2.

[Shanmuga Narayanan Pitchaipillai]

@James Rickards _SN_  agreed any feedback should be constructive, and yes, this post was initiated with that intent.

yes , if why of the change is meaningful and adhering to certain industry standards like that of lets say Scrum alliance or SaFe or some other commonly agreeable standards it would have been so much acceptable in my mind. 

Most of the changes appears to have been done with limited users in mind, the very similar non-technical users , in your organization seem to like these changes, in our side it appears to evoke opposite reaction, for a change both the technical and non-technical users are both disliking the confusion and the learning curve they have to go through to use a work management tool rather than focusing on their own business development.