We’re rolling out a new app switcher experience

[#1]

Atlassian Update: 5th March 2024

Hello everyone,

Custom links are back by popular demand. We understand how much you've missed this feature and we're thrilled to let you know that it's now available again on Jira and Confluence.

If you have any questions about using custom links, don't hesitate to reach out to us. Thank you for your continued support!

Best,

Yuan Zhuang

PM on Platform team

------------------------------------

Atlassian Update: 28th February 2024

Hello everyone,

I'm Yuan, Product Manager on the Platform team. 

We appreciate the time you took to share your feedback with us. Your insights are incredibly valuable and help us improve our products. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by our recent changes, and we want you to know that your concerns have been heard loud and clear.

Here's an update on what we're doing to address your concerns:

1. Custom links: We're actively working on bringing back custom links, and they will be live soon.

2. Org ordering and unclear org names: We're investigating these issues thoroughly and striving to deliver improvements promptly.

Your ongoing feedback is important in our journey to enhance our products. Please don't hesitate to leave comments on this page if you have any additional requests regarding the App Switcher – our team will be keeping a close eye on them. We also encourage you to vote for the following feature requests:

• CLOUD-11754: Show the organization name in full, under the org icon in the global app switcher.

• CLOUD-11755: Ability to customize the order that organizations appear in the global app switcher.

• CLOUD-11742: Ability to upload a custom image as profile icon for an organization.

• CLOUD-11638: Users should be able to customize the App Switcher (Switch To) menu options.

Thank you once again for your patience and understanding; it means a lot to us!

------------------------------------

Hello Community members!

I'm Yuan, Product Manager on the Platform team. We’ve made a variety of changes to the app switcher in our cloud suite to make it easier to navigate Atlassian products without losing time and focus.

Introducing organization switching

Previously, all apps and sites in the switcher were shown purely based on your user access permissions. Now, you’ll see an organization filter, so any apps or sites owned by another organization are hidden from view and no longer clutter the switcher with apps unrelated to your current workspace.

During customer research we heard that the switcher feels too busy, performing too many jobs at once and users have little to no understanding that sites they use may be owned by different organizations.

Our solution is designed to show a limited selection of relevant sites and apps on default, allowing users to switch tools and complete tasks faster, by removing interruptions and distractions from this core workflow.

From a security perspective, this also makes users aware when they are leaving their company owned organization and increases conscientiousness of what information is shared in which place.

What are organizations?

An Atlassian organization is a centralized place that bring together the invited users, products, and sites you have, being the administration level with the highest hierarchy of your Atlassian Products.

When you manage products from this central location, you have access to all administration settings and billing details of the products you signed up for. 

Read more here: What is an organization?

Other changes for end-users

Changes to ‘Start’ and opening apps in a new tab

The link to start.atlassian.com is now shown under YOUR APPS rather than as a standalone hyperlink, and all apps now open in a new tab rather than updating the current tab.

Simplification of app discovery sections

Depending on which product you view the switcher in, you may have seen a variety of Discover, Recommended for you, and More sections that include links to other apps, sites and custom links.

We’ve significantly reduced what you see here, and now only show a single Recommended for you section, so that users can focus on the primary and purpose of the switcher - to seamlessly switch to the next app they need in order to get their work done.

Changes for admins

Custom links no longer visible in the switcher

A key finding from customer research was that users feel overwhelmed by the number elements shown, with many users seeing custom links unrelated their role. To improve the speed of execution for the vast majority of users, custom links will no longer appear in the switcher.

We understand there are a subset of users who utilize custom links to quickly access Data Center instances or other non-Atlassian tools, but this has come at the expense of productivity for the vast majority of users. A suggested workaround is to bookmark these links instead.

If you’d like to express interest in Atlassian building a new feature in the switcher for quick access to Data Center products, you can vote on this suggestion here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-11777

FAQ

Why can I see Bitbucket and Trello associated with organizations that don’t use them?

The concept of an Organization does not apply to Bitbucket and Trello yet.

User access to these products is based solely on a user’s email address. For this reason, if a user has access to either Bitbucket or Trello, they will see it in every view in the switcher regardless of the organization filter selected.

User restrictions in Bitbucket and Trello are currently based on Workspace rather than organization.

Read more here: What is an organization?

Kudos to @Lauren Button for her significant contributions to this announcement.

[František Špaček _MoroSystems_]

Sorry but this is absolutely terrible roll out this time with no time to prepare for changes in advance. Lots of companies around us use quick links to access other non Atlassian systems (so at least they feel interconnected a bit). We, for example, also use it as a quick switch for user to access JSM portal (internal employees do also need to access portal and there is no direct link right now). This release bring us like 10 years back in time where we need to recreate some landing page in Confluence, where we put all links in one place, instead of using this menu to switch apps consistently in the organization. So no, this is not only about switching between cloud and DC.

Not to mention that the list of organizations you have access to is not ordered by name or anything I am aware of and creates a mess if you really have access to more than just a few instances overall. I am part of lots of open source instances as same as instances of some our customers and this is totally useless now to be honest:

From this list I can quickly tell maybe one or two organizations. On the top spot there is an organization I haven't accessed for like a half a year, while the ones I access usually are somewhere in the middle (also our own orgnization for our company is somewhere in the middle as you can see).)

If at least there would be a possibility to force set something for all our organization users into start.atlassian.com (like the missing quick links).

[Martin Kovalcik]

I totally agree with @František Špaček _MoroSystems_ 

We have also been using a custom quick link for our internal employees to go to the JSM portal.

Now I can't find any other way to achieve this.

Could you enable quick links again, please?

[Cyril Philemon]

Ummm....seriously? This sucks! Who are these customers you asked because there is no way this is a better solution. I mean com on, look at it!

This is so frustrating to see a UI change like this that makes my job way more difficult because I cannot even use this "improved" piece of functionality. As a partner with access to countless Orgs, I can no longer switch efficiently to the one I need. 

 

[Haddon Fisher]

A key finding from customer research was that users feel overwhelmed by the number elements shown, with many users seeing custom links unrelated their role. To improve the speed of execution for the vast majority of users, custom links will no longer appear in the switcher.

I feel like a broken record but, yet again, y'all may have listened, but you very clearly did not hear. If the links we ourselves were adding to the menu were the problem...we could...you know...remove them. Using the functionality you already have to do that. Today.

I would instead suggest that the thing people find confusing, overwhelming, or frustrating is the native advertising you are hardcoding into that menu that is presenting them with applications they do not have access to.

I have to imagine you already know this (if any readers are not already aware, CLOUD-11352) which makes this change even more frustrating.

To be unambiguous, the "Switch to" bar should show:

• Atlassian Applications we've paid for
• Links Atlassian admins add to the list
• Nothing else

EDIT: Someone else said this already but +1 to "who are these people you keep talking to??!?!" It feels like maybe you've conflated "Atlassian User" and "Atlassian Shareholder".

[Hope Man]

We used a custom link as the only way to navigate to the Jira Service Desk Portal as there is no other way to get there for the average user.

I don't understand the reasons for removing such a big feature out of nowhere but at least then give us a native link to the Service Desk portal. :(

Users are already starting to complain about this big regression.
And what about feature parity between DC and Cloud?

Link to ticket to get the feature back: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-11806

[Tomas Stekly]

Dear Atlassian, Yuan,

To yours:

• Our solution is designed to show a limited selection of relevant sites and apps on default

If your mission is to limit your customers, you are doing that right, but your mission is to create an environment without losing time and focus, as you mentioned at the beginning of this article. 

In that case, please revert the possibility of picking the things we want in the quick link menu. 

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

With Love,

Bob

[Jack Brickey]

This does strike me as a bit klunky for most and broken for some. Here is my take on addressing the issues FWIW.

• allow admins to hide organizations
• allow admins to drag-and-drop sorting
• bring back custom links
• allow admins to change the icons (maybe already there?)

[Dave Liao]

Agree with the commenters so far.

Longer-term, we should have the ability to self-service leave an Organization. If you're not a managed user, of course. 🙏 (The only JAC ticket I could find for this is closed for some reason, https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-10505 )

[Susan Hauth (Toronto ACE Leader)]

Dear Yuan,

It's NEVER a good idea to remove customization without first understanding how it's used.  We depend upon the customized application link to direct our regular Jira users to the Jira Portal for our internal service desks.  I don't know what customers you were researching, but there is NO way this was a good idea to drop the customization. 

There is NO easy way to get to the portal from within Jira so this was an essential and critical customization on the application links.   Our only workaround now is the Announcement Banner which is terrible and eats up a big part of the screen.

Until customization or another method to support external links is introduced, PLEASE let us revert back to the original Application link.  

Very disappointed in this presumptive "we know better" roll out.  

Susan

[Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_]

We understand there are a subset of users who utilize custom links to quickly access Data Center instances or other non-Atlassian tools, but this has come at the expense of productivity for the vast majority of users. A suggested workaround is to bookmark these links instead.

Um no.  This gave us the ability to have a 'hub' to direct our users to external tools and customer portals, without the need for someone to go out and hunt it down or have an out of date bookmark. We could make updates in one place, that required minimal communications about the change.  This is a major setback and removal of major functional pieces for our teams.  Like I can't imagine why you would want to set teams back in their work in this way.  This is absolutely not forward thinking and is now going to cost our teams time and resources to develop a replacement for in our own way. 

We've already been forced to move to tools outside of the Atlassian sphere to replace lost functionality in Confluence Cloud (being able to share with the entire Org, and not open our instance to the entire world).  These changes are starting to be seen as deal breakers, by my users, and we will be directed to explore other options, rather than the one that use to keep our work centralized.

[Dwight Holman]

Almost all the changes announced here appear to be steps backward.

Like other commenters, we have (for many years) been using the Switch to menu to provide our team with handy links to other apps we use. This is now gone - another reason for Jira Server customers to not migrate to Cloud.

Atlassian has received customer feedback from administrators asking for MORE control of this menu - and instead you have designed, implemented, tested, and deployed a new UI which provides administrators LESS control. Doesn't anyone in the development group speak-up and point out (predictable) frustration these changes will cause for your customers?

Suggests you're failing to achieve core values 1, 3, and 5.
https://www.atlassian.com/company/values

D

[Dave Liao]

@Yuan Zhuang - will there be an option for admins to have their Orgs to revert to the previous functionality? There is a workflow-breaking issue here that we should work to resolve.

[Yuan Zhuang]

Hello everyone,

I'm Yuan, Product Manager on the Platform team. 

We appreciate the time you took to share your feedback with us. Your insights are incredibly valuable and help us improve our products. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by our recent changes, and we want you to know that your concerns have been heard loud and clear.

Here's an update on what we're doing to address your concerns:

1. Custom links: We're actively working on bringing back custom links, and they will be live soon.

2. Org ordering and unclear org names: We're investigating these issues thoroughly and striving to deliver improvements promptly.

Your ongoing feedback is important in our journey to enhance our products. Please don't hesitate to leave comments on this page if you have any additional requests regarding the App Switcher – our team will be keeping a close eye on them. We also encourage you to vote for the following feature requests:

• CLOUD-11754: Show the organization name in full, under the org icon in the global app switcher.

• CLOUD-11755: Ability to customize the order that organizations appear in the global app switcher.

• CLOUD-11742: Ability to upload a custom image as profile icon for an organization.

• CLOUD-11638: Users should be able to customize the App Switcher (Switch To) menu options.

Thank you once again for your patience and understanding; it means a lot to us!

[Haddon Fisher]

Hi Yuan,

I see the ticket to remove applications from the switcher is not on your list - can you please prioritize this as well?

[Yuan Zhuang]

Hello everyone,

Custom links are back by popular demand. We understand how much you've missed this feature and we're thrilled to let you know that it's now available again on Jira and Confluence.

If you have any questions about using custom links, don't hesitate to reach out to us. Thank you for your continued support!

Best,

Yuan Zhuang

PM on Platform team