Stop testing on us please - No more daily changes!!!

Agile can be controlled if managed properly. The problem is that Atlassian, like so many other developers, do not actually understand how to do this, and so get the best customer experience out of it as well. I hesitate to say that they don't care. They just have serious priority setting and management issues.

Once upon a time I liked Confluence. It's getting to the stage where the sloppiness-caused bugs just are an irritant--apart from really slamming down on productivity. SOme of their recent changes had subtle effects that will cost me a full day's work to fix; and even then I'm not sure anymore whetrher they're not going to muck around with my fixes next time around, so that all that fixing work was for nothing.

The latest UI upgrade is a pain. I have opened a ticket https://getsupport.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/23/JST-308586 - one is unable to get to the site home as configured in the "settings". Not good.

I agree that the new UI is a pain, and I wonder what you wrote in your ticket. Unfortunately I am not allowed to see it. Could you quickly let us know what your main pain points are?

Was the question for me? I assume yes. Two biggest pain points are (a) when one clicks on Confluence logo - one is taken to Confluence dashboard and NOT to what you set up as home and (b) when you click on the space name (in breadcrumbs), you are taken to "pages" and NOT the overview page. Pretty bad. One minor grouse is I see big blank space (a few lines worth) in the beginning (top portion) of pages for no reason.

@Abhay PatilYes, the question was for you – thank you for answering it. My pains are quite different: Loading the page tree is much slower than it used to be with the old UI, and often the page tree does not unfold to show the position of a page in hierarchy when you open that page via full text search. Do you have these issues as well?

Till, you can click on your picture on the left bottom corner and then one of the options would say "opt out". Interestingly, the UX designers of Atlassian have not made it intuitive by telling opt out of what - but it is about opting out of the new navigation.

@Till NoeverBut you can only opt-out of the new UI if you are coming from the old UI. If you have created your Confluence instance only recently, it probably had the new UI already, and then you can't go back.

Ash Helm

This is bullshit, don't remove the $%^& Tree, its the reason we pay thousands for this system. I don't recall anyone voting to remove the tree. What is the genius strategy behind this??

Ash Helm

Absolutely agree WTF? Just leave it alone - it works fine like it is.

@Ash HelmI don't think that anyone here wants to remove the page tree completely. What we do want is to get the old page tree back.

I fully agree that the page tree is (or was, for that matter) one of the main reasons why we chose Confluence. Many wikis do not have a page hierarchy at all.

Well, from one moment to another, I got the new UI, just by refreshing a page. Nobody/nothing asked me if that's what I wanted, and I have no idea how to get rid of the damn thing.

And I've been developing on Confluence for the last nine months!

In other words: HOW do I go back! Where's the button?

THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU!!

Got it, thanks to another member.

AnnWorley

@Martin Sauter The trusty page tree is still there—click Pages in the space sidebar to reveal it. Please see Space Sidebar on New navigation and a new look for Confluence

@AnnWorleyI know that there is a page tree in the new UI as well. But – as your explanation demonstrates very well – it is hidden and requires an extra click. And it's not the same page tree anymore: It takes more time to load, it consumes more screen space, and quite often it does not unfold correctly.

For all these reasons I simply want to keep the current UI. Why does Atlassian force us to use the new UI? Let us choose ourselves which UI suits us best!

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/What-just-happened-to-Confluence-Cloud/td-p/622890

FYI: more negative comments and discussion in this thread:

I won't repeat all the points I made there, but bottom line is we hate the "new Confluence experience".

The announcement pop-up on login to Cloud indicates that the "opt out" will be deprecated next week...

Fortunately for us our flight mission-critical site is self-hosted so we'll just never update it. Atlassian and the 3rd party plugin vendors we use will all loose the 'maintenance' revenue stream since there will be no reason to keep paying.

Confluence would be very, very difficult to replace since it's so bloody capable and useful, especially when augmented with a variety of plugins (Comala Workflows, Draw.io in particular) and used with JIRA. But I'll be looking for alternatives - and I've been the Atlassian champion in our organization for years.

Seeing the "new Confluence experience" I almost spat out my Carlton and yelled, "Streuth! F*** me dead!!"

Atlassian has done something unthinkable. They have rebranded a bug as a feature and closed it with resolution = "Won't fix"! Confluence had (or still has, in old navigation) a simple yet immensely useful feature where a user could setup an overview of a space that they normally work in as their home page. However, this feature stopped working in the "new experience". A bug was duly filed. And, lo and behold, it has been declared a feature. Check the link: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-56727

Although it may be futile, I did comment on it even if they closed it....

Comment:

Sorry: TOTAL FAIL. Declaring this a 'feature' is a complete snow job.

Our mission-critical sites are completely built around a custom landing page for the team, not a limited dashboard, and totally dependent on having the page tree displayed, concisely, in the sidebar under a set of customized links and sometimes in a specific order.

Similarly, our enterprise documentation navigation is heavily dependent on having the page trees. And, yes, I encourage our users to employ the search to find things, but even that is made much less convenient in the "new Confluence experience" due to the loss of the search box that you could just click into and start typing.

Your UI "redesign" is total manure, visually and functionally.

Since this change would break all of our mission sites (self-hosted) we'll likely just stop paying for maintenance on them since we'll never upgrade to this fertilizer.

Hear, hear. I will not recommend this product to anybody in the business.

Dear SUPPORTAt least do one favor! See the picture above. In the breadcrumbs at the top of the page, today if I click on the space name, I am taken to the "overview" page of the space that is meticulously crafted by me as admin. With the new experience, it will take me to "pages" that will just show me a list of pages! Please don't do this. Please at least give us ability to gracefully go to the space overview from anywhere! PLEASE!

unknown

...or maybe it is worth to look for another product, since you anyway don't give a sh*t! The opinion of your "Confluence Cloud" customers should matter to you!

Ran_eg9e8s

This will be addressed. Please watch this ticket for more update. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-56869 Thanks

Liron

Hi all and thanks for your posts on this thread.

We are indeed aware of this pain some customers are experiencing with the page tree not being there on Overview pages.

Because we are listening, we have decided to extend the period customers can opt in and out of the new experience and we will only be bringing customers back into the new experience by default (with no option to opt out) in mid September.

Taking this time means two things:

1) More time for you to adjust and learn the new experience, train your team, etc.

2) More time for us to address issues like this one. We are working through this and trying to find the right balance of solutions with you - our customers - at top of mind.

I apologize if the feeling has been that you have been ignored. The team (me included) are working through improving the experience every single day and are reading through everything including these threads. Your voices are not unheard, even if not every single request is fullfilled. We are taking this time to respond and ACT on your feedback, I will soon give an update about what exactly it is we are improving/bringing back etc.

Thanks

Liron

Thanks @Liron for breaking the deafening silence! I for one had used every possible option (Commuity posts, Support tickets, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and direct messages to founders) to no avail.

Apart from page tree, there is issue with breadcrumbs CONFCLOUD-56869 that needs to be addressed. Also, if you can find a creative way to facilitate landing on one's favorite space by default, that would be great.

Liron

Hey Abhay,

Sorry you've been feeling like there has been a silence. There surely isn't one! we have been active on all community posts - perhaps this one is really the one with the least Atlassian-ism on it - apologies for this.

This issue is under technical review as you can see, and as Ran Ding replied earlier to you directly, so it is about to be deployed to production.

I have seen the ticket you raised around user settings for setting a site home, this feature has now been deprecated, as it is hardly used and can be achieved in other means in the product or otherwise. Please mark your favourite space as favourite by adding it to your spaces to have quick access to it always.

Also, your admin can set any space as site home for everyone - although I realise this is not what you're after.

With such a big design overhaul some features are always likely to be deprecated, while other better features will come up as well - this is the purpose we're doing this. Again, your feedback does NOT go unnoticed and we have spoken about this in our team and we shall re consider this in the future again if the need arises.

Please make sure to keep raising feedback like you are doing because this helps us understand you better.

Thanks again

Liron

Really appreciate your response Liron, and truly understand the predicament where some features get depracated! However - sometimes one wonders why some trivial (but extremely non-intuitive) changes are made inspite of the huge user backlash. I am alluding to "Favorites" being rebranded as "Save for later"! It is hard to understand why would one change nomenclature that is not only industry standard, but also has easy recall, to something as ambiguous as "Save for later" - which smacks of "work in progress" flavor! Anyway, it was great to let off some steam knowing someone is listening!

Jason Tocci

Thanks to Atlassian team for your responses. I just wanted to add one note:

The fact that users can "opt-out" is irrelevant on an externally-facing page.

We use Confluence for our online help docs. We don't expect our visitors to understand how to create accounts or do anything more complicated with the UI than clicking on simple links in a readable navigation. By hiding the page tree and throwing in a blog link that points nowhere, this update effectively broke our help docs for our users. To put it plainly, "users can opt out" is not really an answer to "the update broke everything" because it doesn't apply to a pretty significant class of "users."

We're now evaluating whether it makes more sense to redesign the site entirely and keep it on Confluence using the "Instant Websites" integration, or whether we just need to move to a different product altogether. Honestly, that's not meant to sound like an angry threat, but as what I hope will be helpful feedback. As the guy in charge of collecting feedback from users at my own company, I'd want to know if I had to tell my supervisors, "we forgot about a significant use case and it may well cost us some paying customers."

If the takeaway here is that Confluence Cloud isn't really suitable for use as externally-facing help documentation, though, please do let me know. We got set up with Confluence because we were already happy with JIRA and we'd heard this would be a good solution for integrated help docs, but I don't want to pester anybody for features or consideration if the product just isn't meant to be used for what we need.

Thanks for your time.

Wow.
Sometimes I wonder whether Atlassian is looking askance at such huge insights shared here! But I do believe all is not lost, as deomonstrated by @Liron who has been empathetically addressing issues.
It is never too late!

Jason : your comments strongly reinforce the point I've made elsewhere in these threads that the "new Confluence experience" design changes have BROKEN critical use cases that many customers have come to depend on and have invested large resources in using.

In our organization we don't have they cycles to rework our cloud site in the near future - fortunately, our mission critical stuff is all on self-hosted server sites. Unless things change, we'll probably never upgrade those...

Yes, it's been good to see @Liron so actively engaged. Atlassian has been fairly responsive via email also.

So far, however, the overall position seems to be that the changes are a fait accompli, they're just fixing the bugs as they are found (eg the page tree spacing).

Lucy Minato_4kflni

My organisation is in a similar situation to @Jason Tocci – we use Confluence for our online help and we don’t want users to have to do anything other than clicking on links to take them to a page. And we are asking the same question about the suitability of Confluence for our external facing documentation. So it would be nice to get some direction from Atlassian in this regard so we can decide if Confluence is going to continue to meet our requirements.

A few other points I’d like to raise:

Ann Worley mentioned that the Page Tree is still there under “Pages”. Yes it’s there, the problem is this gives a pretty messy view of the page tree (well at least in our case it does, with multiple instances of “User icon” text in the “Contributors” column). As we use Confluence for our online help, our users don’t need to know who’s contributed, they just need to get to the page which gives them the details they need.
While there was plenty of notification from Atlassian about the “new look” I can’t remember seeing anything about the “no opting out” for non-logged in users. So this caught us off-guard and we couldn’t warn our users before they got a new look online help. Myself and my colleagues could opt out if we weren’t ready for the new look Confluence but our users didn’t have the same option.
We used to have a few “Space Shortcuts” that were always shown (so users could quickly go back to a few main pages). This has been lost with the inability to customise the sidebar.

(And Jason, thanks for mentioning the “Instant Websites” plugin, we’ll look into that as an option for our external Confluence pages.)

Jason Tocci

Thanks for bringing these points up, @Lucy Minato. I noticed these too but forgot to mention them. The "contributors" thing feels weird when it's almost always just me writing the pages – why give something that's identical on almost every page such priority screen real estate? – but it didn't even occur to me how much more intrusive it'd look with more contributors.

@Liron - why can't Atlassian demonstrate it's customer-centricity by graciously holding back the "new experience"? It's never too late when it comes to customers! The outpouring of insights and usecases from veteran loyal users is priceless - leverage it to make the new experience truly outstanding! (BTW, just wondering is there anyone else from "product management" watchig this thread?)

Very well put, @Abhay Patil!

Caroline Bartle

Hi@Abhay Patil - I'm a product manager with the Confluence team, and yes I've been watching this thread, along with other PMs from Confluence The feedback from the Community is important to us, as well as useful.

We are continuing to work on the new experience and are aiming to make it truly outstanding. We do have to make tough decisions about where we spend our efforts though - to be as honest as possible, the sooner we ship the new experience to everyone, the sooner we can dedicate the entirety of our efforts to improving the new version (rather than supporting the old version).

John Rauser

This post seems to have gotten a lot of attention. While the majority of comments in this thread are related to the "new Confluence experience" that hit our desks last month, please keep in mind that the root of the problem is the abuse of your Cloud users with constant changes to the live application.

I actually consider this to be an abuse of the DevOps methodologies that are enabling this to happen - its interesting to see an application become difficult to use because of "over-releasing".

The funny thing is, contrary to what DevOps advocates ("more releases, faster time to value") what I'm seeing here is that users don't actually want any of these kind of incremental changes.

In reality, they aren't providing us with any value, we are just getting burned. What we want is for the button to be in the same place the next day.

So who's value is it? The product and engineering teams that get to check off another box and close another epic, probably... Not us. For us, the users, you are actually reducing value with these constant changes.

I actually don't have a big issue with the big UI you dropped on us, its that your CD pipline is becoming a bigger nuisance for me than any issue I have with the application itself.

You guys should really think about this, and if you want to talk about it drop me an email, its in my profile.