A refreshed Space directory for Confluence Cloud

[#1]

Hi there! My name is Jacob, and I’m a developer on the Confluence Discovery & Organization team. For the past few months, my team has been busy working on some cool new features to make it easier to find your Confluence pages.

Since one of our company values is “Build with Heart and Balance”, we believe it’s important that our team strikes a balance between introducing features and maintaining existing ones.

That’s why I am excited to share with you our update to the Confluence Space directory! We overhauled the experience to make it faster and easier to find the spaces you’re looking for.

Refreshed design

Let’s be honest — the old design was functional, but it sure wasn’t pretty. We’ve refreshed the design of Space directory to match the latest Atlassian Design Guidelines. We also took this opportunity to improve the accessibility and responsiveness. Now the Space directory is more friendly to screen readers and will adapt to various screen sizes.

A bit of new functionality

Now can now see which spaces you are watching and watch/unwatch a space without ever leaving the Space directory.

Fun fact: while developing this feature I actually discovered internal Atlassian spaces that I didn’t even know I was watching!

Better performance

I read customer feedback every week, and at least one thing is abundantly clear — many customers care about speed. That’s why I am super excited to tell you about Space directory performance: Navigating to and from Space directory is now 2x faster!

Thanks!

I typically write code, not announcement posts, so thanks for reading! Space directory is currently in the process of being gradually rolled out, and it should find its way to your Confluence instance in the near future. If you have any feedback, please reach out to me via this post! My goal is to make your Space directory experience as smooth as possible. Cheers!

[Kalos Bonasia]

I like this new graphic interface, it is simple to understand and clean. It is easy to use and intuitive. You have done a great job. Congratulations.

[Arthur Mack]

Great Job! I agree its a very clean and easy to use design.

[Tina Hutchinson]

I was shocked when I went to "View all" and found that our Space Directory was no longer displaying Site Spaces! We need this! How else can employees view all available company spaces, without the personal spaces mixed in?  Why remove that ability? I spent 90 minutes yesterday having to add a category to all of those spaces, and now I'm going to have to tell our company that they need to filter Every Single Time they go to the directory, unless they want to sort through this long list that includes personal spaces.  Jacob, I appreciate that you are trying to upgrade the directory, but please - add another button to the row that displays "All, Watching, Starred, Personal Spaces..." that includes "Site Spaces." Ideally, we should be able to bookmark this, as with the previous space directory. 

[Jacob Brunson]

Hi @Tina Hutchinson 

I'm sorry that this change has impacted your work. In retrospect, I see how removing this feature is frustrating and unexpected. I can't give you your time back, but I want to let you know that our team is listening to community feedback.

Specifically, we are following your suggestion by adding another filter, "Communal", which will only show non-personal spaces. (It functions the same as "Site Spaces", but we are trying to move away from the "site" terminology). You can expect this update to reach you automatically in the coming weeks.

Thanks a lot for the candid feedback! It really does help make us better.

[Tina Hutchinson]

@Jacob Brunson  Thank you Jacob. I appreciate that, and I look forward to seeing that update. 

[Tina Hutchinson]

@Jacob BrunsonThank you for adding the "Communal" filter button, which appears in our instance now and shows only what I refer to as our official company spaces (formerly called "Site Spaces), rather than having all the personal spaces mixed in too. However, we used to be able to access this group of spaces directly in Confluence, or by using a bookmark. But a bookmark now just defaults to "All" on this page - forcing our users to click twice to get where they want to go, where they used to only click once.

Is there anyway you can fix this? Maybe by allowing Administrators to set the default for the Spaces page, so it defaults to "Communal" rather than "All"? 

Also, I'm curious why Atlassian chose to eliminate the term "Space Directory" in favor of the more generic "Spaces"?

"Space Directory" was easy to remember and describes exactly what the page is used for; pointing new hires to the "Spaces" page has less impact.

[Jacob Brunson]

Hi again @Tina Hutchinson and happy new year! 

I’m writing to share a small bit of good news: you can now bookmark filters as before, and refreshing the page will not reset the filters you’re looking at. 

I also talked to the team about the removal of the word “directory”.  We thought a straight-forward “Spaces” was the best way to describe what the page does, because it’s both simple & consistent with items in the navigation bar.

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback!

[Laura Minniear]

One thing I've noticed is that any time I change the filter (including selecting Communal), it limits to the first 25 results alphabetically. I have to refresh the page to get the full list with the new filter. I'm using Chrome on a Mac.