Where do I find people interested in the UX / IA of Work Management Software like Jira?

David Pratten

Not sure if I'm in the right forum, but here goes.

I'm looking for a community of practice/ discussion group centred around the UX and Information Architecture of Work Management Software like Jira.

Please let me know where the #ux and #ia types thinking about work management softward hang out!

Here is what I'm interested in working on with others ...

It is my belief that Jira (and likely, all popular work management platforms) impose work on Kanban Teams, Scrum Masters and Project Managers that could be taken care of by the platform. 

For example, the work to keep the information in Jira self-coherent is non-trivial. One obvious example is the partial and ad-hoc support in Jira for coherence of nested Epics/Issues/ and Sub-tasks. This is evidenced by the considerable number of Jira Automations and Workflow steps that are bespoked by everyone to increase the level of coherence between the levels in cascading Epics, Issues and Sub-tasks.

Just to be clear, my interest here is not to criticise Jira. Give me a popular work management solution, and I'm pretty sure we can find a set of user actions that will render the information inconsistent.

My thesis is that we can increase the UX of Scrum Master and Project Managers to the extent that the work management platform offers them operations with guarantees. The operations update the issues/tickets/ projects or whatever AND guarantee to leave the information coherent and consistent. 

If you are interested to see work that I have already undertaking in this area see: https://meta.rosellamodel.online

Hoping to find others of like mind.

All the best,

 

David

 

 

Colum McAndrew

It's a great question David. I think the issue here is that whilst there are general principles about how information architecture should be used, particularly if using the agile methodology, I've found that there is no one size fits all solution. You make the system work for you rather than the other way around. Tools like Jira have to fit into that model to be financially viable.

This is also true of other tools I've used for various purposes throughout the years. No one tool meets all your requirements, unless it has been specifically written for your needs. Whether it is tools offering scripting, APIs, or automation, they cater for the requirements of the many. That way the "solution" offered by companies like Atlassian, allows the user base to meet their requirements whilst maintaining the tool's economic viability.