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New UI for Atlassian products

Greg Macdonald_yq8294

Repeatedly since you put the new UI into beta and then partial roll-out I have switched on the new UI in Confluence and Jira and consistently found it degraded our ability to get work done. Every time I've switched back to the old UI and provided feedback that the new UI degrades usability. Then finally, you forced the new UI in Confluence and we enjoyed the team activity of all suffering equally.

This is not a question of how it looks, although I do dislike the "simplified" UI and yet another app with a blue theme getting lost on my desktop. This about functionality. I am totally fed up with taking several clicks and screen loads to navigate to something that used to be one click away. I am beyond frustrated that some things seem to now be just impossible to get to at all. The design clearly assumes that nobody ever works in multiple projects and jumps around a lot. The simplified UI might be well tailored to somebody who makes limited use of your products in selected ways, but it is horrible for people who actually do work in these products on a daily basis and do anything other that the narrow workflows you have designed for.

I am thoroughly frustrated with the loss in productivity, the things that have either been removed or are now so well hidden that I can't find them, with every time a coworker gets frustrated and comes to ask me how they now get something done in the new UI.

I assume that any day now you will likewise destroy Jira by forcing this horrible new UI there. If it were not an even greater cost and loss of productivity, I would find another software solution and push to replace Jira and Confluence at my workplace. Meanwhile, in spite of being quite enamored with SourceTree for years, a fear that you will turn your designers loose on that product has me regularly checking GitKraken for when it might be a viable alternative.

But, no doubt I and others who have complained are just a small percentage of your customer base. I doubt you took this UI through any meaningful user testing and suspect you have not dared to take a survey of how users feel about this new UI? No doubt somebody is quite proud of this new UI and argue that we simply haven't learned it or we don't like change or we'll get used to it and come to love it. Well, I like change. I like change a lot. But, I have two criteria for change: 1) it be different, and 2) it be better. This isn't better. It blows.

Warmest regards,
greg

Comments

Luke Machowski

Greg, thank you for articulating your frustrations with the new UI. I too share the same frustrations, albeit not to the same magnitude, but still enough for it to have a meaningful degradation in our flow. 
The biggest impact on us has been moving pages to the new place. Something that used to retain context and allow me to navigate through the content in 1 click has become something that requires several clicks which interrupts our flow. I suspect that the designer on this change probably does not use confluence in any extensive fashion or forgot to time the impact on any real users. Notice how the new design requires the user to remember (and click through) their context to get to a sibling page  tree whereas the previous design actually remembered and showed the context. Tut. Tut. 
 
I trust that that you guys will humbly admit defeat on a few of these key usability concerns  and rectify them. We are passionate users and supporters of your team and long standing users of your product and if you are able to convert our sincere feedback into the experience we had (or better) then we will continue being strong evangelists of the benefits of the Atlassian stack like we have been. 
 
In short, I understand that change brings about good things, but it’s hard to find the right balance of novelty and functionality. It’s impossible to get every part of change right each time. You are being judged now at how well you convert the concrete feedback into action. Then we will be singing your praises once again about all the other wonderful things you guys have introduced. 
 
Sincerely and with hope
Luke

Luke Machowski

The biggest impact on us has been moving pages to the new place. Something that used to retain context and allow me to navigate through the content in 1 click has become something that requires several clicks which interrupts our flow. I suspect that the designer on this change probably does not use confluence in any extensive fashion or forgot to time the impact on any real users. Notice how the new design requires the user to remember (and click through) their context to get to a sibling page-tree whereas the previous design actually remembered and showed the context. Tut. Tut.

I trust that that you guys will humbly admit defeat on a few of these key usability concerns and rectify them. We are passionate users and supporters of your team and long standing users of your product and if you are able to convert our sincere feedback into the experience we had (or better) then we will continue being strong evangelists of the benefits of the Atlassian stack like we have been.

In short, I understand that change brings about good things, but it’s hard to find the right balance of novelty and functionality. It’s impossible to get every part of change right each time. You are being judged now at how well you convert the concrete feedback into action. Then we will be singing your praises once again about all the other wonderful things you guys have introduced.

Sincerely and with hope

Luke

Greg Macdonald_yq8294

Luke,

Thanks for your tempered comments and adding a positive mood. Yes, I'm frustrated. Part because of the failures of the new UI and part because repeated feedback has been completely ignored. Sure there are surely many customers, but there is feedback on these boards and I'm sure many of us have provided quiet feedback using the in-app mechanism. Surely this has been enough for Atlassian to know there is a problem.

Also, FWIW, Confluence is annoying but tolerable. Jira is seriously degraded by these changes.

There was a time when number of clicks to get a task done was important, considered in design and validated in user testing. Now, more often we seem to design software for aesthetics and generalized design principles with a diminished regard for usability. I long for the days when the number one rule was make it work.

Jai Djwa

Yes, agreed. I especially resonated with this comment: "The design clearly assumes that nobody ever works in multiple projects and jumps around a lot."

With the latest UI changes in board handling, I am struggling to recreate the workflow all an "All issues from All projects board." Frustrating.

Greg Macdonald_yq8294

Yes, now that they have forced this UI on us, I and my team are getting really frustrated. I can't find how to get to our old dashboards at all. And a lot of things require many clicks or even involve a search to find.

I cannot understand how this UI could possible have gotten thru user testing. There should have been many tasks on the list that a user would not have been able to perform or would have taken much more time and effort as compared to previous UI.

Perhaps our efficiency has evolved beyond testing. Clearly design has evolved beyond usability. Pathetic

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I am trying to be positive about the changes in the UI, but I'm afraid the best I can do is that it has really made the "cloud vs server" question easy. The new Cloud interface is pretty much useless. Migrate to server.

Ronald Vallenduuk

Nice to see I'm not the only one who is... err... not impressed with the latest 'improvements'.

Atlassian seem to follow the lead of the like of Google in creating a good product and then gradually making it worse.

What was wrong with a bar at the top of the screen with navigation options for projects, boards, issues etc? Now it's at the side which takes real estate away from columns on my scrum boards. The navigation options in that side bar seem to change with every screen so I'm regularly lost.

One of the worst changes is the quick filters. Who in their right mind thought that hiding toggle buttons for filters in a dropdown list with scrolling and checkboxes was a good idea? It's made organising boards and backlogs so much slower.

Another idiotic idea was moving boards under projects. Boards are like views in a database. I have many boards that span multiple projects. Now I have to remember where Jira has decided each of those boards should live. Is there even a list or search of all my boards? If there is, it's so well hidden in the improved navigation that I haven't found it yet.

And then there's all the minor issues like all that beautiful white space that just gives me RSI from all the scrolling.

Worst of all is when I think of all the real-world issues that could have fixed instead, like the ability to hide time from certain users, that loyal customers have been asking for for FIFTEEN YEARS!!!

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-2364

Greg Macdonald_yq8294

Ian Main

I HATE, HATE, HATE this new UI. It's SO unproductive and easy to get lost in.
I'm an Admin and I've not had one single person say they prefer it.
What the fudge are you guys playing at?
Please listen to your users and revert it back or give us an option to!!!!!!

Luke Machowski

Hello everyone. I just noticed on the latest cloud instance that they have added back the pages in the panel on the left. Hooray. Thank you Atlassian. That is much better now. This resolves my biggest frustration with my original post in this thread.

Wiki Pages on Left.png

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