Jira Issue Assignee List Incomplete

[Matt Richards]

When creating a Jira issue from a sticky on a whiteboard we are having a look at the assignee field and not all of our team members are present. In fact, different team members see different lists of potential assignees.

How do we have all team members shown to everyone?

[Jonno Katahanas · Accepted solution]

Hey @Matt Richards our "Assignee" field uses Smarts to personalize the list each individual sees. This is similar to how the field works in Jira.

If the person you're looking for isn't in that default list, you should be able to click into the "Assignee" field and start typing to search for the user. If the user you're looking for has access to the site & project, they should appear. See example screenshot below.

Please let me know if this isn't working for you & we can investigate.

[Matt Richards]

Thanks. That was the problem the user was having. They have confirmed it works as you described. 

I'm in the process of onboarding a new team, none of whom have used Atlassian software before. These "Smarts" have caused a lot of confusion. In my view they are an ill conceived UI element. 

Am I correct in my understanding that a "Smart" is a drop-down which instead of showing all list members shows recently used list members, and which has as hidden text entry field with which to search the non-visible list of all members? 

Assuming so, my personal take on this, for what it's worth is:

1. The search is completely opaque. There is no indication that there are search capabilities. On mouse over the cursor changes to a pointed finger, which does not indicate text entry, and there is no visible indication that you can type in what is secretly a text area. 
2. Showing only recently used list members means that a new user has nothing to select from (presumably) and with the opaqueness of the search, they will not know how to locate a list member and will thus arrive at a dead end just as my user did, not knowing how to proceed and assuming the tool is broken.

It might be more useful to show the full list, create visibility around the text entry, and turn that into a filter of the full list instead of a search of an invisible list. 

[Jonno Katahanas]

Re; what a "Smart" is - it's purely where we apply a list of personalized recommendations based off what we understand about the user. In this example, it's showing a list of users we think the person works close to or are relevant to the Jira project. Another example of applying "Smarts" could be personalizing the list of users someone sees when they try to  "@mention" someone in a Confluence page.

Re; your feedback - totally agree it's not super clear the input box is searchable. Will raise with the design & PM team. cc: @Christina Ristevski @Daniel Simmonds 

On the point of "showing recently used list members" - I don't know all the parameters the Atlassian Smarts team uses to surface a list of users but it includes more than just recently used. It'll look at other parameters, too. As the system learns about the user & who they interact with over time, it'll become more accurate.

I'll pass on some feedback to the Smarts team re; default states. Out of interest, did your user see a list of people to select from? Or was it just blank?

[Matt Richards]

Our user could see only me and not the other members of the small team we have in Atlassian products. 

Frankly, as I've set up a new Atlassian account for myself for this project (despite > 10 years of using Atlassian products) and I have onboarded people entirely new to Atlassian products, the "Smarts" have been a consistent problem and have caused a lot of confusion. Even today, many weeks into our usage, the drop down list members are still off. I really think the feature is trying to be much "smarter" than it actually is. For what it's worth, I'd go back to basics, show the drop down people are expecting, turn the search into a filter and make it's text input obvious. 

[Jonno Katahanas]

I'll pass this onto the Jira team that owns this experience. Thanks for the insight.

I've raised with our whiteboard team the need to make the search input more obvious.