How To: get the most out of the new Confluence navigation and Home

[#1]

Hi Community,

Elaine again from Confluence Cloud Product Management.

Most of you have used the new Confluence navigation and Home for some time by now. Not sure what changed or just want to learn more about the new experience? Continue reading here.

We understand major UX changes like this could take some time to get used to. We gathered some pro tips to help you harness all the power of the new Home and navigation.

1. Get back to where you left off, quicker using Recent

2. Never get lost with Spaces switcher

3. Search and find in a blink of an eye

4. Stay connected and get social via People and Feed

5. Keep your Confluence site up-to-date with handy admin tools

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1. Get back to where you left off, quicker!

Recent is the place to find all pages/blogs that matter to you, not just those recently visited or worked on. Your starred pages and drafts are here too!

Access Recent from the top navigation

No matter where you are, you can select Recent in the navigation and scroll. Want to speed things up even more? Simply use keyboard shortcut G R to open the Recent menu.

View Recent pages on your Home page

Whether you start your day on the Home page or need to get back to something you worked on before, the Recent pages section lets you easily pick up where you left off - whether you starred a page, just viewed it, or saved it as an unpublished draft!

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2. Never get lost

We built some GPSeque features that make sure you never feel lost or feel the need to pull over for directions.

Know which space you’re in or switch spaces using Spaces in the top navigation

Have you ever needed to pull information from other teams while working on a project plan?

If you need to jump back and forth between spaces, the top nav Spaces menu shows you your current space and gives you options to quickly switch to another.

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3. Search and find in a blink of an eye

Get to the search bar quicker than it took you to read this sentence. No extra steps, just type / to access the search bar.

Keep in mind: While you are editing, typing / doesn’t open search. Typing the slash command ( / ) in the editor lets you insert any element without taking your hands off the keys.

Ready for the next level? A complete list of keyboard shortcuts can be found under the ? (Help) menu.

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4. Stay connected and get social

Connect via People and Teams

The teams and the people you work with are easy to get to in the People menu in the top navigation.

Here you can find people that you collaborate with closely. Selecting a name takes you to their user profile. Let’s assume that you know Alana has been working on something you need an update on. You can go straight to her profile to see what she’s been doing.

You can also see all the teams you belong to in the People dropdown. Start a team if it hasn’t been created. By selecting a team, you’ll land on the team profile that lets you:

• see what a team is working on. You can see recent pages, project plans coming from that team and find any information about a team quickly and easily.

• review a team’s recent work and stay informed about work teams are doing.

• add resources to your team so everyone on the team can see what’s important.

Select View all people and teams to explore your entire organization in the people directory.

Get social and adjust your Home page

Want to know what your coworkers are up to (especially while working remotely)? Give your feed a little more room on your Home page by dragging it left.

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5. Keep your Confluence site up-to-date with handy admin tools

Keep in mind: you need admin permissions in Confluence to access these features.

Create a new space from your Home page

Did you know you can get to your Home page by selecting Home OR the Confluence logo on the top navigation?

Select the + button next to the Spaces heading gets you started. Spaces are great places for a new project, an entire team, or a general knowledge base.

We understand that you may want to look at all the spaces that exist before you create a new one. Easy! Just select View all to the right of the Spaces heading.

Share site-wide announcements

Tailor the Announcements section based on your organization’s need. Keep it up-to-date with major announcements and other important information about your organization and your Confluence site.

I hope these tips help you move more efficiently around Confluence and that you enjoyed geeking out about navigation with me!

Please share your best tips and advice below with others. Also, let us know what you want to learn about next!

[Sachin]

Thank you for the post @Elaine H. . I have always loved using Keyboard shortcuts , like you mentioned my personal favorite is / to bring up the macros or to search for content

[Stephanie Zhang (Product)]

Awesome post @Elaine H. !

[jake]

When a user interface is redesigned, it generally results adds unnecessary frustration and effort to my day.  Here is a way to think about it.  Imagine how you would feel if I re-arranged your whole house while you were at work.  Including where you put everything in the kitchen.  Now you come home from work and have just enough time to fix dinner before the game.  Ohhh darn you have to look everywhere to find what you need for dinner.  Now you go to the living room and your favorite chair and couch are gone because they were part of the clutter.  I'm just guessing that you would feel a certain amount of frustration and perhaps more.  I doubt you would want to hear about all the glorious benefits of the new arrangement.  Either way this is the way the house is staying until I decide to change it, so get used to it.  Please think about this when you are part of a user interface redesign.  It will generally piss off your users.  Make sure the new interface is so good you can win them back again. 

I was struggling with submitting this, but after struggling with the new interface I need to share my thoughts. 

[Elaine H.]

@jake , thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us. I hear you and agree with you. Coincidentally, we've been using the same analogy internally too.

We have gone through multiple rounds of user research and testing and a progressive rollout of the new Confluence navigation and Home experience with opt-out option available at organization level and for individual users. Our rollout of the new experience was completed by the end of July.

In case you missed them, these are earlier community posts on the steps we've taken to "make sure the new interface is so good you can win them back again" as you put it:

• New navigation and Home are coming to Confluence Cloud 
• Calling all Confluence Cloud users! Give us feedback on a new navigation concept. 

What are some of particular changes in this release that have negatively affected your work? If you have any advice on what we could've done to make this transition easier for you, we love to hear it too. Thank you!

Warmly,
Elaine Hankins, Confluence Cloud Product Manager

[Aaron Shapiro]

I like how you prioritize your road map. Confluence Cloud SUCKS. It's TERRIBLE compared to the self-hosted version and is really a completely separate product because of all the macro and feature disparities it has. Yet... Bringing cloud into greater alignment with self-hosted version is not a high priority for Atlassian? You would rather prioritize overhauling a terrible UX experience with a new terrible UX experience over bringing your feature set into alignment? WHO MANAGES YOUR CLOUD PRODUCT? I would like to call up that product owner and have a little chat with them. 

It's 2020 CLOUD IS THE PRESENT, SELF-HOSTED IS GOING AWAY. GET ON BOARD. Start making CLOUD as important as the self-hosted or STOP SELLING IT. 

[Elaine H.]

Thank you much for sharing your feedback, @Aaron Shapiro. My name is Elaine. I'm a PM working on Confluence Cloud. I hear that you were concerned with Confluence Cloud not providing the features and experience you need in comparison with the on-prem version. I'd like to learn more.

Could you share some examples of the macro and feature disparities that have affected you the most? Are the gaps primarily coming from your migration from server to cloud, the cloud product itself, or both? What aspects of the new UX in the cloud version do you find particularly problematic? What does a great feature set alignment look like to you?

We strive to make continuous improvements to Confluence Cloud and to our support to customers on their server-to-cloud transition. We look forward to hearing more from you and addressing any further questions/concerns you may have. If you prefer a chat with us offline, please let us know. Thank you again for your time!