nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Ask an engineer: Behind the scenes of the new navigation

Brett Uglow

Hi everyone,

I’m one of the engineers who helped build the new navigation experience. We know this change has sparked a lot of discussion, and that a shift like this is disruptive.

Ask me anything about building the new navigation, and I’ll do my best to give you a transparent, detailed answer.

Curious about why we made certain technical choices? Want to know what didn’t go as planned, or what’s coming next? Drop your questions or thoughts in the comments. Your feedback is invaluable and helps us keep improving the experience for everyone.

Cheers,
Brett Uglow
Principal Engineer

Comments

Martin Vali_aexsqj

Hi, Why all the visuals are the same color - hard to distinguish

Kuvatõmmis 2025-04-24 094434.png

Gauthier Support Manager

Hello

how did you come to the conclusion on JSD to change from a contextual menu on the side depending on which project you are, and a global one top, to a global one on the side, that is cluttered and need multiple click to access what you want when you have multiple project, and having a top bar still there, but with most of the space used for a search function ?

As a user, I only see a lot of wasted space on top, and way to much information on the side that I don't need, depending on the context. I cannot hide, because as soon as I switch to another project, I'd require the hidden stuff.

Having to scroll on my side menu to get what I need is awful as user experience, especially when you have to do it a hundred time a day for work, and the fact that most of the icons are barely readable with no color or distinguishing shapes doesn't help it either.

I do understand that you want your UX to be updated but could you elaborate on what was the intent behind this change ? Was it to make it pretty, or more practical to use ?

Thank you for your time.

Martin Flury

The often promoted reason for the new navigation "decluttering the screen and helping to focus on the real thing" I don't see it at all!
The new navigation blocks more space on the screen and reduces the available area for the real work even more.

Just compare old vs. new and tell me, were can I focus better on the real work and were do I have more space to show the bords content?
(On my print screen below; I'm not complaining about the size of the the side bar, I know it's adjustable and dynamical)

new navigation old vs new.png

Despite the fact that Atlassian is horrible in using the available space on a computer monitor efficiently.
There is often so much space left and right and just can not expand it fully.

old vs new editor.png

I don't see any real progress in Atlassians products.

Martin Flury

There are not enough thumps up for this statement

As a user, I only see a lot of wasted space on top, and way to much information on the side that I don't need, depending on the context. I cannot hide, because as soon as I switch to another project, I'd require the hidden stuff.

Debbie Jolley_vo7os5

"Your feedback is invaluable and helps us keep improving the experience for everyone."

I really would implore Atlassian to take note of your own words.

There is a LOT of feedback at the moment and the vast majority is negative re the new 'improved' navigation. Please listen and rethink the steam roller approach to the rollout which is currently going to create a lot of extra work for a lot of paying clients.

Dominik Březina

Greetings!

I am very glad someone from the team offered to answer community questions. Mine are very simple:

Why you had to build it? (all considered there are more important painpoints reported from community)

Why only admins can switch to new UI for try out and not regular users? (this change will impact everyone, yet only admins can put their hands on it)

Martin Flury

We had to take some key users into the role of an admin, just to be able to have some basic users getting there hands on it and being able to collect feedback from the real user base for the needed training at the big roll out.

And there will be trainings needed!

Gauthier Support Manager

I might be wrong, but at least for JSD, I had an option to turn on the new UI for all agents, not only for admins.

Gary Spross

@Marine Redon posted a good question regarding the color scheming here.

Rafa_qznmo3

also, that kind of feedback should have been seeked before wasting time building the wrong solution to the wrong problem (the right problem being all the many feature requests and bug reports)

Marco Dieckhoff_lrdpln

Were any professional UX designers involved in the concept?

Scrolling through long lists of tree views with basically no distinguishable factors, where you need to read all the time to validate you are in the right "folder" might be a design choice, but it definitely isn't a usability choice.

Nithya Ananda_lw391m

The new Navigation is really nice. Here is a new request from my product managers.

"Can we navigate Teams from the side bar and star the teams we are managing and keep them in the Stared list" ?

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Brett Uglow

First, thank you for taking the time and offering the opportunity for customers to ask questions.

#1) There are many threads / questions on this same topic right now in the community, as there have been in the past for other design changes. What does Atlassian plan to do differently this time in how they respond / interact with questions? In my observation, such prompts often linger with limited responses and / or are shutdown after a time with no further posts permitted. (e.g., the design choices behind team-managed projects, and their impact to the stability of the product ecosystem)

#2) As you note "why we made certain technical choices", are you also facilitating this same conversation topic in the developer community? https://community.developer.atlassian.com/

Kind regards,
Bill

Anne Saunders

Why aren't JSM views (Boards) handled like JSW boards? Why is my Boards view gone?

Darryl Lee

Hi Brett -

I noticed on that around Apr 12-13 (the weekend before we were supposed to have the option to switch to the new nav) that the fonts changed.

Did your team do some "pre-staging" work updating/replacing CSS that you thought would not impact people who had not yet switched?

I wonder if you also may have pre-staged any Javascript changes as well, specifically any that may affect the Editor. In https://support.atlassian.com/requests/PCS-400760/ I describe some issues we are having on our Confluence instance that is NOT YET on the new navigation.

Specifically we are unable to edit pages that were converted from Legacy to the New Editor, even after reverting back to a Legacy version of that page.

This didn't seem to be an issue until right around the Apr 12-13 weekend when I noticed new fonts.

I've asked support to escalate the ticket, but hey, since you've made yourself available here, I thought I'd cut out the middle man. :-D

Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist

As a Jira Administrator, I need to be able to access the full list of boards and be able to do admin tasks with them. We used to be able to access them in the "For you" section -> Boards -> View all boards. Where can this be accessed in the new navigation?

Gary Spross

@Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist, I had asked this same question previously. You can access the list of all boards by clicking the search bar. You'll see lozenges at the bottom for Boards, Projects, Filters, Plans, & People. Why there's not a sidebar menu item for Boards is beyond me...

Anne Saunders

PREACH. All the Dashboards, all the Filters, all the Teams...no Boards? Seriously?

Martin Flury

@Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist I'm with you as I had the same question.

Under For you - Boards, you see some boards, but not all.

Click into the huuuge search box in the top menu bar and there you will see Boards at the bottom.
This is the way to finde the board overview with the search function.

Andrea Robbins

One piece of feedback is the queue popout for JSM:

1. I have to click several times to see the pop out button. I have to click on the queues/work category, I have to click on a queue, and then I have to click on the button to expand the queue. Before there wasn't even a need to expand the queue so this extra work is a major set back. I need to see this popout icon when I hover over the queue/work category title. It looks so overwhelming having the queues on the left-hand side.

2. I don't think this should be per work category/section to have to do all that I mentioned in number 1 to have it pop out. I think it should just be a setting somewhere like a toggle if I want to see if on the left or have ALL of the queues popped out. No one works in just service requests or just problems. We go back and forth all the time. When I do this I have to repeat the steps in number 1 (plus having to first sending the queues back to the side bar first) just when I want to go from queues to incident section if I want them to pop out.

Also, another piece of feedback for the Jira settings portion, the Archive and delete project options are at the bottom when you click on the 3 dots. Yes there is a line in between the project settings option and the Archive and delete project options, but mental memory of a lot of admins are used to the project settings at the bottom. I can't tell you how many times I have almost deleted/archived a project when trying to go to project settings. Archiving and deletion of a project should be within the project settings itself. We are not deleting and archiving projects every day.

Anne Saunders

Amen and seconded to all of this.

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_

That's my main gripe as well, why do the JSD end up cluttered on the left panel and not get the full project experience of JSW/JWM?

When it gets pushed to the left panel it's harder to find, there is no color or differentiation from the navigation items, so very difficult to work with!

I love that JSW/JWM you can have a background color/pic that really lets you know what project you are in. JSD you are lost....

Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist

I like the idea of having a search bar that gives searching capabilities in one place to all the products I have access to, for the organization I'm logged on.

What I do not like, is Atlassian mixing products (apps) from different Organizations within this section and also I do not like Atlassian pushing products that I don't even use in this section.

In the screenshot below, this organization has only 2 products: Jira and Confluence. Why do I need to see all the other options in there? And when I click on, say Trello, I get content from other organizations!

Screenshot 2025-04-24 at 12.02.35.png

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_

Why can't I sort my favorite dashboards and filters? It's really painful now that they are squished into the left panel to quickly navigate to my favorites in order of my most favorite to my least. I did end up re-ordering by un-starring them all and then re-starring them in reverse order of favorite as it put the most recent favorite at the top. Weird.

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_

I really wish that in the top search bar that I could just start typing in JQL vs having to click and click till i get to view all issues, then change the default jql to what I really want to search for.

Andrea Robbins

I just tested this too. This is really bad/confusing. I get the mixing of products as they are like "apps" in the new ideology but mixing of data from different orgs is terribly confusing.

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_

Why was changing the navigation which obviously was a lot of development time and has provoked a lot of controversy prioritized over some of the really highly voted JAC issues? Changing where to find stuff is NEVER on my priority list of things I would like to see fixed or improved in Jira.

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_

Could not agree more with the JSD navigation! So many clicks to get information not productive at all and buried in the left panel!! Make it like JSW/JWM PLEASE.

Anne Saunders

It would be very cool for them to use the same functionality as 'pinning' fields in a work item.

Anne Saunders

It would have been so nice to combine the old top-level main-nav with the tabbed project-level-nav.

Two slim tiers of controls that sit quietly at the top of my screen until I need them - with the main-nav giving me a few tidy, targeted sub-menus, and the tabs working exactly as they do - might have actually been nice.

Anne Saunders

How nice would the tabs in the new JSW view be for JSM? Yes, please!

Dena Campasano

On top of what everyone else has already asked, that I agree with, why was the decision made to change reports so drastically?

They worked well before, they were efficient, choosing new reports in the list in JSM kept your date range. So when I compile my weekly, monthly, quarterly, & annual stats, I don't have to start over in every report I open.

The Workload report was a nice overview of every agent, and now you have to search for each agent individually.

Michele Colson_777luj

@Susan Hauth _ Jira Queen _, I completely agree. I wish this every time I put JQL into the search box and then realize I must open the filter section. It's so annoying. It seems that I do this daily.

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_

The one thing I would really would have like to see in the new navigation is an easy way for our regular Jira users (JSW/JWM) would have a button or link to easily get to the JSM Portal(s). It's so painful and I end up asking everyone to bookmark the JSM portal as they can't raise JSM issues within Jira. And before you say they can, they can't when there are forms involved as well as hidden request types within the portal are not hidden if creating an issue in JSM in Jira.

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_

Hi Michele, I do this MANY times a day...so frustrating.

Debbie Jolley_vo7os5

now THAT would be the sort of (presumably) fairly simple change that would be a complete game changer for so many users

Greg D

I had a similar thought here. I had recommended sea foam green out of preference, but what I was mainly suggesting is that some colors are not readable nor aligned across elements right now.

Greg D

As mentioned here, would be really helpful if site admins can define the starting point for what is hidden and shown for users when they are switched over.

Greg D

I ended up writing a ton about this again, so figured I should nest it as a reply.

In Orgs that have been in Cloud a long time, there are a ton of starred items and other sections that will never be needed on the left-hand panel. So the first reaction of every user that gets switched into the new view is "This is so much information and very overwhelming. I'm lost and I feel mad." They eventually get more familiar, but we would rather help make it a more positive first impression and have them focus on the actual work instead of battling their frustration. It will always be a win for Atlassian if site-admins can adjust the chosen defaults of every setting in the system and then can properly champion new features for it applies to their Orgs. Regular users can still have control from there to adjust differently.

I guess my questions are, why is everything defaulted to being shown instead of hidden to start? Why would things like Operations, Assets, and Apps take up precious real estate when those things are not being used on a site and regular users should not be focused on Apps in their day-to-day in this type of tool to get their work done? Why can't every section default to only showing Starred to out of the gate and then users can toggle each one to Starred & Recent? There is already an overall Recent bucket at the top, so more noise in each section gets wild. Why can't a site admin set the starting order and what is hidden? Why does the "For you" section still show the huge advertisement panel for Operations on the right side with no ability to collapse it?

Based on a prior discussion I had, I think you all are already aware that JSM projects are overwhelming and confusing and you are trying to provide more controls within those. JSM always seems to be an afterthought on these changes.

Of what you already built, why can't site admins just have these controls for their own users to help you all set the proper order and views for users that we know much better than Atlassian does? I think your answer is consistent documentation and trying to generate more revenue, but for the former, a simple "Your site admin can set which sections start hidden" covers documentation and for the latter, the confusion and superfluous sections just has the opposite effect of people wanting to leave the product. I am an early adopter and can get comfortable with all of this quickly. Every other person that has turned it on told me they do not like it (honestly, change is always hard and so it is an uphill battle there). Please democratize site admins to help make this better.

Greg D

I responded to another place, but also realized visuals could help here too...

If we cannot be given control, Atlassian can first fix JSM, change every section to stars only to start, hide all sections on the left under "More" except Starred, Projects (workspaces), and Filters. Then it might be less confusing. Maybe instead of unfurling a project/workspace when you go into a work item, it can just highlight the project name and keep it collapsed too. That would help reduce clutter.

You can find Recents under the big search bar on the top (along with a way to get to boards), and you can always add things back to the left. Look how much nicer this is as a starting point (and I do use Plans, Dashboards, Boards, and Teams):

More Targeted Sidebar.png

And it is all still there:

Everything is still available to be brought back.png

Piyush Annadate _ACE Pune_

Seems many feedback on the way !!!

1. For different plugins, ex. JXL sheet, i need to visit, need to open any of board, then the Sheets - now that create a big confusion as JXL sheet has it's own filter or related to Board condition as SHEET IS VIEWED IN BOARD LIST.
2. 'Recent' should have differentiation - For Issues, Boards, Dashboard, etc.

Ethans Davish

Thanks For suggestion

Brett Uglow

Hi Martin,

That's a design question that is best answered by a designer. I have seen future designs that add more colour to the sidebar.

There is also more user-customisation coming to the sidebar, to allow people to have more control over what is visible & what is hidden.

A technical challenge with lots of colour (color) is it can be really difficult to support unbounded colour-customisation while still keeping the text accessible. That's why when colour customisation is provided, it's usually in the form of known-accessible colour schemes.

Thanks for your question!

Brett Uglow

Hi Martin,

Another design question which, being an engineer, I can't really answer. But I can provide some examples that are indicative of the effort to declutter the UI:

Sidebar user-customisation
Tab-nav project-customisation
Focus-mode (sometimes called fullscreen-mode)

These features weren't conceived independently, but are part of our strategy to allow people to easily access the features they commonly use and allowing them to hide the things they don't use.

Brett Uglow

Hi Debbie & Rafa,

Thanks for your feedback. Again, not really an engineering question, but I can share my observations...

When I joined this project as an engineer, the design phase was ongoing. The early signals about the early designs were positive, but were qualitative (user-interviews, observing 1-on-1, surveys). Qualitative feedback needs to be considered alongside quantitative feedback (analytics).

To get some early quantitative data, the engineering team wrote a Chrome plugin which replaced the Jira navigation with a simulation of the new navigation top-nav and side-nav. The team analysed the data, which indicated that the design was improving customer satisfaction of the navigation.

A hard-to-hear truth is that you & I are not representative of the entire Atlassian customer base. I'm an engineer, so I use Jira and Confluence accordingly. Project managers use our products differently to program-managers. Admins are different to individual-contributors. Even within a cohort (e.g. Admins), there is a large variation in how people use our products. That's why we need both qual-and-quant feedback in order to make decisions.

The qualitative feedback is very visible on these Community pages, which leads to a perception that the "vast majority" is negative. However, the quantitative feedback indicates the new navigation is exceeding our expectations. That's why we're moving forward.

Brett Uglow

Hi Dominik,

Varsha's page provides a good summary of what the new navigation is, along with how Admins can turn the new nav on/off for all users, during this initial rollout phase.

I addressed the why in an earlier response. Thanks!

Brett Uglow

Hi Gary & Greg, please contact Atlassian Support to report bugs.

Brett Uglow

Hi Marko,

Were any professional UX designers involved in the concept?

Yes, but none of them were harmed in the making of this concept.

Again - this question isn't in my wheelhouse (as an engineer) - but I can provide two observations:

No one in Atlassian can unilaterally make changes to products without there being a lot of signals indicating that the changes have a positive effect. The new navigation is no exception.
The head of design for Atlassian, all the way down to individual product designers, were involved in the design of the new navigation.

Thanks for your question.

Brett Uglow

Hi Nithya,

Thanks for your feedback!

The best way to share this feature-request is via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar:

Jira feedback.png

Brett Uglow

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your questions!

1) That's a big set of questions! Atlassian has been encouraging more employees to join the community (which is why this conversation started), which should help to reduce the time it takes to get a response.

2) I wasn't aware that there was a separate developer community (I thought this was it). I'd be happy to facilitate a conversation there in the coming weeks.

Cheers,
Brett

Brett Uglow

Hi Darryl,

The majority of the Nav4 code has been "pre-staged" since October 2024. We use feature flags to toggle it on/off for different cohorts, environments and servers. This technique is part of our normal development process in Atlassian.

When it comes time to roll out changes, we do it gradually for two main reasons:

Risk mitigation
Measurement

But unfortunately, due to the feature-richness (complexity) of our products, some edge case behaviours are broken and not detected before the change reaches customers. Many changes are made on any given day, and it is possible that a change on April 12-13 broke this experience.

Escalating via Atlassian Support (as you have) will ensure that it gets fixed in the shortest possible timeframe.

Brett Uglow

Thanks for the feedback, Rodolfo (and Andrea)! I agree that it is confusing seeing data from different orgs.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest raising this via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar (see screenshot).

Brett Uglow

Hi Susan,

The team is working on improving the ability to customise menu items further. I can't provide timelines, unfortunately, but it is a feature that we would like to support across all products/apps, not just Jira.

Brett Uglow

Hi Susan,

Being a humble engineer, decisions as to what to build and when are above my pay grade!

There is famous book called "Who Move my Cheese". It's about how people deal with change. I find it frustrating when products change their UI and "move my cheese" instead of fixing bugs or improving the UI.

The philosophical answer is "change is the only constant". In the movie Top Secret, the idea is expressed this way: "Things change, people change, hairstyles change... interest rates fluctuate".

I guess that Atlassian sees that improving customer-satisfaction with the navigation across all products is a higher priority than most product-specific issues. And just to be clear, the team that worked on the new navigation was just a small fraction of the entire engineering effort within Atlassian. It wasn't an "all hands on deck" effort, to the detriment of everything else. But it is a big change, and requires focus to deliver it in a coherent way.

Brett Uglow

Hi Dena,

I'm afraid I don't know anything about how reports work/worked. I'll try to find someone who can answer your question.

Brett Uglow

Thanks for the feedback, Susan (and everyone)!

If you raise this suggestion via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar (see screenshot)... :-)

Brett Uglow

Hi Greg,

Thanks for going into these issues in depth. This is really a design question, but the designers wrestled with the line between "too many" and "not enough", and it really, really depends on your role. As you shared, for new users it is often a "too many" experience. But for people in Admin roles or having org-level responsibilities, it can feel like "not enough". Therefore, the designers have (and continue to) design for user-customisation.

Regarding Admin-customisation, I think we want to support this capability more. But I don't have any information about work that's being done in this area..

Regarding default-hidden, this was discussed internally a lot. As you can imagine, products that were potentially hidden-by-default were not too happy with the idea, as from their perspective, "customers can benefit from our product, so why would we disadvantage them by hiding our product?". So the path taken was, "Let customers decide what they want to see and what they want to hide".

There's always tension between UX and making customers aware of new features that can help them do their work more efficiently.

Brett Uglow

Thanks for the feedback, Piyush!

If you raise this suggestion via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar (see screenshot), it will go into a customer-feedback queue (JSM!), and then will be further categorised and directed to the right team for consideration.

Morgan Watts_9u2pqd

Hello Brett,

I'm trying to avoid treating this as a feedback thread. Personally, I'm curious about what was your favorite technical challenge that came with upgrading to the new navigation?

Was there anything in particular that more challenging than the rest?

I'm not an engineer, but I always enjoy hearing about problems and the mind-set y'all took to solve them!

Greg D

Thanks again for offering this "ask-me-anything", Brett! Sorry that I jumped into a lot of design elements and feedback (those are so top of mind right now based on what our stakeholders are relaying).

Maybe I missed the window, but piggybacking off of Morgan, let me try to ask other questions that may be more up your alley.

Any notable performance gains on page loads or API call improvements baked into the new nav that you all implemented while building?
Any fun greenfield tech that you were able to explore on the way to delivery?
Were Engineers able to interact directly with customers for feedback at all? If so, did that go well? If not, do you wish you had more direct interaction?
What feature are you most excited about that is still yet to come?

James Rickards _SN_

Hi @Brett Uglow , can you expand on what the qualitative feedback metrics are being captured and the technology used for measuring them? I am asking from an engineering perspective, around the data you provide to designers to support them in their decisions.

For example, I wish I had a Tobii eye tracker to put in-front of some of my staff to quantify a change in cognitive load (e.g. the amount of time eyes spend on irrelevant sections on the screen),

Hans Polder_7ci2ta

Hey Brett,

Thanks for starting this thread! I was wondering:

- Is the site title in Jira not showing in the new navigation on purpose- or is this a bug?

When switching back to the old navigation, the site title becomes visible - but after enabling the new navigation, it disappears.

Anne Saunders

It's also broken in Confluence and the bug report has been relabeled a "Suggestion" JRACLOUD-85564

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_

Hi,

Well I'm having trouble finding my cheese. Or my cheese is buried among so much cheese I can't find it (JSM project navigation).

I would still vote a 1000 times to not spend so much energy and development, design time on UI when there is a long JAC list of really highly voted items.

Like I said...no one votes for UI overhaul.

Susan

Hans Polder_7ci2ta

Thanks for sharing Anne! For me, it still works in Confluence though (in the new navigation). I see that the bug you linked to is only for Jira. What issues are you experiencing in Confluence?

Mark B Wager

100% !

In general, using the Ui to push Atlassian products (sorry, “Apps”) creates a LOT of user confusion, disappointment, and clutter (not to mention administrative overhead)!

I would LOVE for ALL of that to be removed.

Mark B Wager

🤣 This thread made me laugh! I love the interaction and honesty! I do love being part of this community. 🙂

Darryl Lee

Hey @Brett Uglow - question about implementation.

Now that Administrators can individually opt-in to the new Navigation, is there any TECHNICAL reason why this more user-friendly way of rolling out the UI could not be made available to regular users?

Back in 2020 when @Matt Tse managed the rollout of a new navigation, they allowed users to opt-in on their time table. This was greatly appreciated by people like @Dennis Walsh who eloquently wrote:

I appreciate the statement that "We are also putting you in control of this change. Once your instance receives the new navigation, each of your users will be able to switch over to the new navigation on their own timeframe." These changes look promising, but users still like to at least feel like they're in charge of their environment.

This is much better than the "just get used to it" approach used by certain "other" software companies (which shall remain nameless) who simply force-feed all of their "enhancements" on their users in one swoop, leaving the users either powerless to undo things, or -best case- forced to flail about and try to figure out on their own how to get their interface back to the way they want it.

Debbie Jolley_vo7os5

Having some form of individual control would be a much easier 'sell' to a lot of users.

I note with interest one of the statements at the top of the original post by Matt that Darryl linked to:

"We heard your feedback on the current navigation in Jira Cloud. You told us that the current navigation adds challenges to finding and quickly accessing your work. To solve this, we are building a new navigation experience that puts the navigation at the top of your screen for a more familiar look and feel."

And yet one of the big changes in this new navigation is to completely reverse that? - I'm baffled.

Brett Uglow

Hi Morgan,

Thanks for your question! I also love the code-disassembly/weird-bug blogs that are on Hacker News from time to time. Unfortunately, I don't have anything quite as interesting to share. But...

My favourite technical challenge has been to get server-side rendering (SSR) of the Sidebar to work in Jira. This involved gaining an understanding of how Jira routing works, our different SSR stacks (we actually have 2 - we're in a multi-year process to migrate from one to the other), Relay components and a thing called an EntryPoint. All of these components need to work together in order to render some HTML within a 2sec(?) budget.

Regular lazy-loaded components need to load their code before they subsequently request their data. EntryPoints (EPs) are cool because they allow the code and (Relay) data to be lazy-loaded at the same time. Additionally, our tech stacks allow us to pre-load EPs, allowing us to SSR the sidebar (and page) pretty quickly.

We are still migrating all routes in Jira to use these EPs, which will simplify our sidebar code further. As it is today, we have to have 2 code-paths when rendering the sidebar (the EP-route and non-EP-route path). Once every route is using EPs, we can remove 1 of the code paths.

Brett Uglow

Hi Hans & Anne,

One of the goals for the new navigation was to have the products (apps) all using common "platform" components (e.g. AtlasKit). The reason for this goal is to avoid the situation where Product A implements their top-nav one-way, and Product B chooses different features... which is exactly what has happened in this case.

The challenge for the AtlasKit team when redesigning these platform components is to be aware of all of the customisations that different products have made to the previous version of their components. The site title was a feature which wasn't identified until relatively late in the process.

The AtlasKit and design teams have since produced a prototype of a top-nav which supports an optional site title, for all products. It's now a matter of implementing it in all products.

I note that in JRACLOUD-85564 , a customer has noted that, "... it shouldn't be too difficult to fix...". In isolation, that's true. But the AtlasKit team has to come up with an implementation that:

Doesn't increase the height of the top nav
Works with and without the title
Supports titles that can be n-characters long (I think there is a max length, but I don't know what it is)
Doesn't interfere with the existing responsive layout (which affects the sizing of the logo, search bar, and top-nav icons)
Supports custom colours & themes
Works for all products

This takes time to get right.

Brett Uglow

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the questions!

Any notable performance gains on page loads or API call improvements baked into the new nav that you all implemented while building?

We are seeing notable improvements when transitioning between pages (after initial load). Initial load slightly improves for some pages, and slightly regresses on other pages. This is a performance battle we've been waging since November 2024. We've made a lot of improvements in the API calls and reducing the amount of code that is loaded for the initial render.

Underlying this performance-work is an assumption that the new nav should be at-least as fast as the old nav. But is this valid? Does the old-nav do the same amount of "work" as the new nav? The answer is no - the new nav does a lot more work upfront than the old nav did. However, that hasn't stopped us attempting to get performance parity-or-better.

Any fun greenfield tech that you were able to explore on the way to delivery?

Midway through the build of the new nav, we swapped from LaunchDarkly to StatSig. That seemed simple at first, but StatSig expands upon the idea of feature flags and A/B tests with a whole suite of capability around experimentation. A data scientist's dream! But from an engineering perspective, the more experiments that are run, the longer it takes to rollout features, and the more complexity that exists in the code for a longer amount of time (i.e. we can't clean up the old code while an experiment is running). So I'd say the capability is fun, but it comes with a downside.

Were Engineers able to interact directly with customers for feedback at all? If so, did that go well? If not, do you wish you had more direct interaction?

There were opportunities to observe customers using the software as part of gathering qualitative feedback. And engineers often responded to feedback provided via the "Give feedback" button. Looking back, I think the Product Managers and Designers did a really good job of listening to customers, categorising the feedback and making design changes accordingly.

The design of the new nav has been changed many times over the last 12 months, based on customer feedback. For example, early designs didn't allow the Starred and Recent menu items to be re-ordered or hidden. User testing and customer feedback indicated that customers expected to be able to reorder & hide these items. So we changed the implementation.

What feature are you most excited about that is still yet to come?

There are probably two features I'm "looking forward to" (I'm an engineer - excited is hard to compute :

1. Drag-and-drop side nav reordering. JPD projects currently have this. We are exploring how to implement this everywhere.

2. Moving to platform-implementations of the navigation components. While we aimed for this state, it proved too difficult to achieve in the timeframes we had. But more work is happening in this area. What it means for customers is a consistent UX across products, simpler bug fixes (there's only one place to make a code to change, not 20), and faster development of new features.

Brett Uglow

Hi Darryl (I'll write a separate response to Debbie),

Thanks for your question. There's no technical reason why we couldn't allow users to opt-in/out themselves.

The design of the rollout process has taken months. During that time, we gathered feedback from early adopters and beta-test customers. We got a lot of feedback from customer-admins saying that they would require time to update their organisation's training materials. The larger the organisation, the more time that they would require. My understanding is that this feedback primarily led to the rollout process that we see today.

Personally, I would have liked the ability for people to self-select. But every organisation is different, so we've put the Admins in control during the initial rollout phase (phase 1). In phase 2, Jira users can opt in-or-out. In the third phase, the new navigation is always on.

In comparing the rollouts, the new rollout adds an additional phase for admins to control when everyone can opt-in, before reverting to full user-opt in. So it's similar to the previous rollout, but supports large organisations better.

James Rickards _SN_

Does Atlassian utilize a Correlation-ID in logs that is visible in a web request's response? I ask as I'd like to include it when reporting defects / bugs as it might aid your support teams in faster resolution.

For others following along, a Correlation-ID is generated when a web-request is made to a server as a result of an action like clicking a button. It is passed down to all downstream applications (e.g. databases or microservices) and asynchronous events triggered by the initial request. This ID is then included in application logs (logs are a record of what the system does in response to a request often used in debugging). By consolidating logs from various subsystems in a single log platform (e.g. Splunk). This allows developers to filter the massive list of logs an application produces to those relevant to that specific interaction with the system. These IDs are often displayed on error dialogs so that screenshots of the error message from users can be used to quickly identify the relevant logs.

Correlation-IDs are often included in the Response as a Header that can be viewed via the F12 developer tools provided with Chrome, Edge and FireFox.

Brett Uglow

Hi Debbie,

I'm sorry that this is baffling! As to why an earlier design choice has been reversed, I can say two things:

1. The new nav announcement post provides reasons for the different changes.

2. The statements made by Matt are from 2020. In UI-design terms, that's about 1-and-a-half design generations ago. I say this not to be dismissive, but the technological landscape and user expectations in 2020 are different to 2025.

One of the big benefits of the new nav (in Jira) is the ease with which you can to switch between different projects because they are all visible in the sidebar. This wasn't possible in the previous nav because the projects weren't visible until you opened the project menu. For customers working on one project 99% of the time, this feature doesn't matter. But the majority of Atlassian customers do need to switch between projects regularly.

Brett Uglow

Hi James,

That's a very technical question, and thanks for providing the background info - bravo!

Yes, we do use correlation IDs that allow us to trace a request through the various layers of services and infrastructure. When we get a support request that is potentially related to a network issue, the Support Engineer typically asks for a HAR file (a HTTP Archive), which captures the HTTP requests and responses for a page-load. This allows the second and third-level support teams to trace what happened across the different services, which helps identify what is going wrong.

yqiao

Hey Martin, I am also from the Engineering team of New Navigation. So same as Brett I couldn't give any professional answer from UI/ UX theory.

However, as a user who uses Jira everyday:), I think the new navigation has some better parts compared with the old one:

It's more easier to check all boards within a project:
1. In old nav, the only way to see all available boards within a project is clicking the board switcher on the sidebar
2. In the new nav, all boards will get displayed on the 1st screen if we are in one of projects pages(eg: board, backlog)
3. In the new nav, we can view boards from a project by checking sidebar no matter which page we are in(excluding settings page). Whereas in the old nav, we can only assess boards via visiting a project 1st, or head to the boards directory.
Consolidate meaningful content of the navigation:
1. In old nav, we spread meaningful content on both top navigation and sidebar. When we are in a project page, all project related infos are viable from the sidebar. But what I viewed recent/ get assigned/ starred are still within the topNav
2. In the new nav everything related to our work will appear on sidebar
More efficient space usage:
1. In the old nav, every time we open a menu from the top navigation, the menu will block a part of page content. A good example is, the project header will be blocked when we open up the project menu
2. There is no such a issue from the new nav as those menus have been moved to the sidebar

Martin Flury

@yqiao

are you joking? "More efficient space usage" Realy?!

Atlassian is, in terms of space efficiency, getting worse and worse.
In my point of view, there is no improvement.

I'd rather have a menu bar that blocks some content in the moment I'm navigating on the menu, then having an additional menu bar open constantly.
Don't you see that you just reduce the actual working space peace by peace?

Jörn Gruël

Hi Brett,

to be honest, probably Atlassian should involve their engineers regarding their UI designs, instead of leaving it completely to designers which seemingly have not too much experience regarding frequent use of UI's to manage lots of structured data.

As it can be read all over this thread here, there's a big amount of problems commonly seen by Atlassian users. Wouldn't it be a good idea to concretely discuss about the planning of changes? Instead of just collecting meanings and discussing around and around? I. Need. Changes. At least any piece of hope, that Atlassian soon will address named problems.

Rafa_qznmo3

@Jörn Gruël

I honestly thing it's the opposite. Engineers making changes and decisions they don't know anything about, for the sake of refactoring tech debt in their code; or rather, instead of refactoring old crappy code, it seems as if they have thrown away old code and rewritten stuff on some shiny new libraries or something. That's why things that worked before now are broken, because they forgot to rewrite the old fixes to those broken things.

And the issues with terrible new status colours, inconsistency between status colours depending where you see them, the new outline icons, the fact that the new issue icons are not even used on the starred list, the inconsistency between jira software and jira service management sidebar and board views, etc, etc, etc.. all this stinks of siloed teams, nobody in charge, and no real UX design of the whole thing; plus releasing all these big changes at once, àla big bang deployment, stinks of poor project management.

It is funny (not!) that basically the main point of this big change is to have a consistent UI across all the atlassian products.. and yet it's actually very inconsistent, everywhere you look.

Mark B Wager

Hi @Brett Uglow ,

Thank you for engaging with us. We REALLY DO care and appreciate the interaction!

In your answer to @Bill Sheboy I see your answer to #1 ("What does Atlassian plan to do differently this time in how they respond / interact with questions?") is to "encourage employees to join the community". Then, to what end?

I'd like to add to Bill's question — does Atlassian plan to address "the community's" MANY concerns? And, if so, will it be by...

... taking actions to change course?
... fixing problems before release?
... incorporating our input?
... changing release timelines?
... and re-adding missing functionality?

So far, I've heard more explaining WHY and HOW than acting on our actual concerns.

It feels like we’ve raised a fire alarm, and instead of investigating the smoke, you’re handing us a brochure about how great the new fire system is.

The users in this community are experienced. We don’t panic over change. We adapt — when change makes things better. But right now, we’re not resisting innovation — we’re signaling problems: critical functionality lost, administrative work more complicated, confusion being created, time wasted. And what we’re hearing in return isn’t acknowledgment. It’s marketing. Articles and chats that tell us why the changes are great — while skipping over the parts that hurt our teams most.

That’s not partnership. That’s PR. And when trusted tools stop working and trusted voices stop listening, teams don’t just complain — they make plans to leave. We don’t want that. We want to be heard and changes made BEFORE rollout, not after we’ve lost what made your tools great in the first place.

Our voices are not alone, every post in these forums represents HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of others in our organizations.

Please take action.

Thank you for your engagement and interaction!

Very respectfully,

Mark

Brett Uglow

Hi Mark,

To be quite frank, I'd love to see more engagement from the Atlassian team in this forum than currently exists. I'm not a marketing person, or a department head, or a designer, so I don't know about everything that is going on. Here's what I can answer:

does Atlassian plan to address "the community's" MANY concerns? And, if so, will it be by...

... taking actions to change course?

... fixing problems before release?

... incorporating our input?

... changing release timelines?

... and re-adding missing functionality?

The designers and broader team are monitoring these forums (although sometimes people (not you Mark) provide feedback in a way that isn't healthy for anyone, which makes people less-inclined to assist). Many many changes have already been made (and are in-progress) based on customer feedback (1,2,3 & 5).

Release timelines (4) are tricky, as there are lots of stakeholders at the table. Customers are very important. Organisations are very important. Engineering costs are pretty important. I don't think a release strategy exists that would please everyone.

It feels like we’ve raised a fire alarm, and instead of investigating the smoke, you’re handing us a brochure about how great the new fire system is.

Yeah, it is frustrating. Everyone that has worked on this for the last 12-18 months is really invested in making this huge change as successful as possible. We won't get everything right, even though we're trying to.

Something I haven't shared (I don't think) is that there is a new team in Atlassian which is focussed on improving app-navigation on an ongoing basis. This stands in contrast to past efforts where the navigation-changes were run as projects. It means that there will be ongoing improvements to the navigation.

Brett Uglow

Hi @Anne Saunders, there's an event you may like to join in 10 hours time: https://ace.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-atlassian-live-presents-qampa-with-matt-kroeger-and-aditi-dalal-on-atlassians-new-navigation/

... which might give you an opportunity to ask this question.

Brett Uglow

Hi @Dena Campasano, there's an event you may like to join in 10 hours time: https://ace.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-atlassian-live-presents-qampa-with-matt-kroeger-and-aditi-dalal-on-atlassians-new-navigation/

... which would be a great place to ask this question, if no one has followed up with you already.

Anne Saunders

Thanks @Brett Uglow - It was a GREAT Q&A, and I appreciate you sharing it!

Unfortunately, when @Aditi Dalal provided her email so I could directly send feedback re: how I interact with Boards, I was on mobile and couldn't save it to actually email. If there's some way someone can message me, I'd be happy to send an explainer.

Aditi Dalal_irrjsc

Hey @Anne Saunders it was so good to chat with you yesterday Please feel free to reach out at adalal@atlassian.com, keen to hear from you!

Vaishali Patil

We have about 200 Jira projects. Is there a way, to customize the horizontal navigation for all projects. For each project we have added couple of shortcuts and we have few apps but everything is now too cluttered.

As an admin, I need to be able to standardize the look across every project

Like everyone else on this thread I really dont like the new navigation. I am dreading all the complaints I am going to get.

Brett Uglow

Hi @Vaishali Patil ,

Unfortunately there isn't a way to customise the horizontal tab-navigation across multiple projects.

> Like everyone else on this thread I really dont like the new navigation

Thanks for sharing. The good news is that ordinary users seem to like it, as the opt-out rate is < 2%.

Regarding the complaints you will get, take heart. When Australian supermarkets moved away from single-use plastic bags to reusable bags (which they charged customers for), there was an uproar - for about 6 weeks. Then people accepted it and moved on with their life. The same will happen in your company.

Marco Dieckhoff_lrdpln

> as the opt-out rate is < 2%.

So, there is an opt-out?

I users complain, how can they, or can we as admin, disable the new navigation for them then?

Anne Saunders

@Brett Uglow the inability to mass-manage JSW tabs, or create tab schemes I can apply to projects feels like an oversight.

We explicitly disallow Team-managed projects so that our software teams and cross-project teams like DevOps and Design can move seamlessly between projects with a clear expectation of where they will find tools and information, what card colors mean, etc...

By making me manually touch each of hundreds of projects to manage their tabs, we've introduced friction into what was a fairly frictionless system.

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