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Work type no longer easily visible on board

Thomas Brennan

With the roll out of the new board view, this has obviously not gone down well with our staff. One persistent complaint is that the Work type on the cards now only shows the symbol and not the full thing. We use about 30 different work types to one of our boards and the icon shown is one of three dependent on the region so you can tell at a glance what you're working to.

Without creating a new custom field that automatically fills when creating the new work item, is there another way to display this easily.

Here are previous complaints from the community on this issue:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-73516

Accepted answers

Sarah Marenchino | Devoteam

Hi Thomas,

I can understand why this is particularly problematic with around 30 work types sharing just three icons. Being able to identify the work type at a glance is important.

I checked the current Jira Cloud documentation and found a couple of relevant points:

1. New board view settings

Under View settings → Fields → Work type, you can control whether the work type appears on the card.

However, the documentation doesn't confirm an option to display its full name instead of just the icon. So this may not address your actual issue.

2. The feature request you referenced

JRACLOUD-73516 concerns the New Issue View rather than the new board cards. Atlassian closed it as "Won't Fix" in November 2024.

3. Alternatives without duplicating data

For company-managed boards, card colours can be configured by work type or JQL. This might help distinguish categories, although I appreciate that colours alone won't solve the problem with 30 different types.

I haven't found a documented native option to display the full work type name directly on the new board cards.

Given that this affects the new board rollout specifically, I think it deserves a separate feature request rather than relying on the older issue-view ticket.

One question: are you using a company-managed software board? That would help confirm which card customization options are available in your configuration.

Trevan Householder_Isos-Tech-Consulting_

Hi @Thomas Brennan , I totally get the frustration. @Sarah Marenchino is right that the new board has no setting to show the work type name on cards . JRACLOUD-73516 also covers the issue view, not boards.
Since the card only shows the icon, you might consider making the icon do the work. Give each of those 30 types its own icon (even a simple letter or short code) under Settings > Work items > Work types > ••• > Edit > select image (steps here). Icons are shared across spaces, so check who else uses those types first.
For grouping, query swimlanes help too. Set one lane per group of types, e.g. type in ("A", "B"). Each lane's header shows whatever name you give it in plain text. No duplicate field needed.

All comments

Sarah Marenchino | Devoteam

Hi Thomas,

I can understand why this is particularly problematic with around 30 work types sharing just three icons. Being able to identify the work type at a glance is important.

I checked the current Jira Cloud documentation and found a couple of relevant points:

1. New board view settings

Under View settings → Fields → Work type, you can control whether the work type appears on the card.

However, the documentation doesn't confirm an option to display its full name instead of just the icon. So this may not address your actual issue.

2. The feature request you referenced

JRACLOUD-73516 concerns the New Issue View rather than the new board cards. Atlassian closed it as "Won't Fix" in November 2024.

3. Alternatives without duplicating data

I haven't found a documented native option to display the full work type name directly on the new board cards.

Given that this affects the new board rollout specifically, I think it deserves a separate feature request rather than relying on the older issue-view ticket.

One question: are you using a company-managed software board? That would help confirm which card customization options are available in your configuration.

Thomas Brennan

This is a company managed space, colour coding might help somewhat on the cards but I can see this also not helping with the variety we have. I really don't want to be duplicating data by making a new field and hovering over an icon.

While that issue was closed some time ago, many people are still complaining under it and there are many duplicates such as 76053.

Whilst I could go down a feature request that doesn't help me currently, ideally I'd like for atlassian to give me the option to roll back these changes they constantly make but I won't rely on it.

Trevan Householder_Isos-Tech-Consulting_

Thomas Brennan

I get that 73516 is to do with issue views, but it's the same grievance across both Issue view and Board cards that we now have. Changing the Icons is not an easy solution as mentioned there are just too many and currently help people know regionally where the work is from at a glance, about 4 different ones used. I can't reasonably expect staff to have to learn and distinguish between each at a glance if there's 30 or more.

However swimlanes might be a good solution, it means changing how we currently use then for this space in particular but I'll run it past some people, try a couple of options and get a feel from some people about it and go from there. I'll let you know if we end up working this into how we get around this issue. Thank you for the suggestion.

Thomas Brennan

Swimlanes has had a mixed reception, with how things are within our project this has made quite a few swimlanes and arguably more clutter. It's not been totally negative and has been a step in the right direction, I'm working with a couple of my colleagues in porting how we manage some of our work into the JXL app which we use for a bunch of other things.

I'll close this question for now and keep playing with things and like @Sarah Marenchino | Devoteam said if this is still causing us enough grief I'll open a feature request.

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