New navigation and Home are coming to Confluence Cloud

[#1]

Update as of June 29, 2020 PST:

• The new Confluence navigation and Home experience has been rolled out to all Confluence customers.
• We have permanently replaced the old navigation across all Confluence users.

More questions or thoughts? Please check out How To: get the most out of the new Confluence navigation and Home . Thank you!

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Hi there, Community,

Elaine here from Confluence Product Management. Some exciting changes are coming to Confluence soon that will help you intuitively navigate and get to information faster.

We'll roll out these changes gradually and keep you informed and in control every step of the way. Please review the What to expect next section below to learn about our rollout timeline and experience.

Jira Cloud (Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, and Jira Core) are also rolling out a new navigation. Learn more about the Jira changes here.

First, let’s start with new navigation for Confluence Cloud.

We heard from you that our existing navigation made it difficult for you to easily find your way around Confluence. You may remember in July, we recruited users to give us feedback on a new navigation UI. Thanks to 300 of you who participated! Overwhelmingly, feedback was positive - over 95% of early users preferred the new navigation to the current one.

Since then, we’ve improved upon our navigation prototype and the new experience thanks to input from many of you. We’re excited for you to try the improved navigation. It provides:

• Quick access to everything you need in Confluence, your way - the navigation bar is always visible from anywhere, so you can quickly go from point A to point B, however you prefer to navigate.

• A more intuitive and discoverable navigation experience - the things you do most, like searching creating pages, and switching between spaces, are intuitively placed at the top with labels to locate easily.

• A clear indication of which product you’re in - the product name is always on display, so you know whether you're in Confluence or Jira and can easily switch between them and other Atlassian products.

Learn more here: New navigation documentation.

Welcome Home

Home helps you navigate, find information quickly, and get on the same page with your team. It brings together the destinations, content, and activity that's most important to you in one convenient location. Home is where you can start in Confluence and reorient yourself when you’re moving on to a new piece of work.

Home features:

• Get back to where you left off with recent pages - find pages you’ve drafted, recently published, visited, or starred.

• Dive into spaces you frequent - navigate to starred and recently visited team, project, and knowledge base workspaces.

• Keep up with your team with activity feed - browse a feed of activity happening on your site, with personalized relevant feed coming later.

Want more details? Check out the Home documentation.

What to expect next

We'll continue to roll out the improved navigation and Home gradually over the next few months until June, and we’ll gather your feedback as we go. You may have, and if not, will receive emails and and in-product notifications with advance notice about these changes and more details on what to expect and when.

We are also putting you in control of this change. Once your site receives the new navigation, each of your users will have the opportunity to turn off the new navigation for a period of time. If you do not want your site to automatically receive the new navigation, simply let our Customer Support team know.

FAQ

• I’m an admin of a site, and I will need to communicate this change to my teams. Where can I go to get more information?

  • As an admin, you will get additional emails about these changes with more information about the new experience. You can use our documentation to help your teams understand the new experience.

    • New navigation documentation

    • Home documentation

  • We will also be offering an in-product guided tour of the new experience to all end users and admins.

• When will my site receive the new navigation?

  • The new navigation experience has been going through a progressive rollout to make sure customers of various sizes have sufficient time to prepare for this interface change.

    Generally speaking, you’ll receive the new navigation experience:

    • by mid March if your Confluence site isn’t connected to any Jira product.

    • sometime from April to early June if your Confluence site is connected to any Jira product.

    • in early June if your Confluence site was created in recent months without the new experience

  • In any case, admins and users will receive advance notice in product as we approach their site’s rollout date.

• How can I stay updated on the progress of the rollout?

  • We will continue to send you and your team notifications and emails about these changes. We will also use this community post to update you on changes.

• I’m an admin of a site, and I need more time to communicate this change to my teams. Can I be excluded from the initial rollout?

  • Effective June 29, all Confluence sites and users are on the new navigation and Home experience.

  • Prior to June 29, Yes. If you would like to be temporarily excluded from the initial rollout, please contact Atlassian Customer Support.

• As a user, can I postpone the new navigation?

  • Effective June 29, all Confluence sites and users are on the new navigation and Home experience.
  • Prior to June 29,

    • Yes, after we release the new navigation to your site, you will have the ability to postpone using the new navigation for a period of a few weeks. When you're ready for the new nav, you can turn it on from the user profile menu at the bottom left.

Additional questions and feedback

If you have comments, questions or feedback, please share with us below. You will also be able to provide feedback in product once you receive the new navigation.

[Sven Schatter _Lively Apps_]

Huge improvement! Can't wait. :)

[James Dellow]

Great to see the old style new navigation is back! 😀

[Davin Studer]

It's like it's so retro that it's new. Awesome!!

[Campbell Trevor]

Will this remove the ability to set  the "Site Homepage" under "Further Configuration" and so break our site for anonymous users?

[cylon]

@Campbell Trevor the default landing experience /wiki will show your custom Site Homepage if you have a custom site Homepage set. Your custom Site Homepage (if configured) will show up on the nav as the first item, followed by Home etc.

[Jim Mason]

Thanks for providing a "heads up" article on navigation changes.

After the poor rollout on the new editor, I'm leary of any new changes.

Issues from the new editor rollout hopefully won't be repeated here:

> lack of user configuration options to choose which navigation features to use / show

> poor testing of product features

> removal of existing functionality without providing equivalent replacement functionality

> poor use of screen real estate with no user configuration options to manage real estate

Here's hoping for a better experience with navigation

[CIO PMO]

Great view !!

[thinhhd]

Great! 

[Kwame Afreh]

Great! Waiting patiently.

[Patrick Martin]

This will be great. 

[Xiaoxin Bai]

Great! can't wait!

[Colin Smith]

This is great!   I've really disliked the new navigation in Atlassian's products and am excited to see the old model come back.  Now this has me excited to see useful navigation come back to Jira as well.

[Hedwig Fernandes]

Looking forward for this!!

[Evans.Munene]

Liking this for sure. Will be on the lookout for changes

[wendy.stanton]

Looking forward to using this!

[Idir Mellal]

Happy to join the Atlassian community! 

[Rach Hogan]

I can't wait to use it!

[dilruba_tariq]

Should be useful and more fun!

[Deleted user]

@Elaine H. This sounds really fascinating, thanks, but I only learned about it from a comment posted in another thread I am following.

How do regular users learn about this type of development? I don't have the luxury of searching the forums all day long for useful nuggets of information. I wish I did.

Is there a central RSS feed or something I can subscribe to? Without advance notice, it can be disconcerting and sometimes unhelpful to be surprised by some of the changes that appear unannounced in the product(s).

Thanks.

[Idir Mellal]

This is outstanding!

[Kevin Daniels]

Hi @Elaine H. this is great : If it is not too much to ask could you grant access to an Early Access instance so the team can get up to speed on the new UI? 


Thanks

Kevin

[Ethan V.]

Excellent! Make it look like a updated version of Server. Finally.

[John Tolle]

Update for 5/5/2020:

OK, I have to admit that the new "old-style" UI update is really nice.  It doesn't take up much in the way of vertical space and, as I said originally, having the actual name of the site displayed ("Jira" vs. "Confluence" etc.) makes it much easier to distinguish one from the other.  The search also seems faster, so I assume there are some performance improvements under the hood there, too.

Original Post from 12/11/2019 (with 8 likes, so you know whether the likes are for this or the update):

Not to be the party pooper, but I've gotten used to the current left-sidebar style navigation.  It allows so much more horizontal real estate to be utilized, and with most users accessing Confluence using widescreen monitors, horizontal is the real estate to use.  For mobile users, a hamburger menu replaces the sidebar handily.  Now we're going to suck up additional vertical real estate which is much more precious and we'll no longer have the nice clean top space we currently have.

On the other hand, I love the fact that the Jira and Confluence logos and names (seriously, who can differentiate between those logos?) are going to be prominently displayed.  I make the mistake of thinking I'm in Jira when doing a Confluence search and vice versa, and foolish frustration ensues.

I also love that the Create button is returning.  The plus sign is wonderfully simple, but maybe not as intuitive as Apple would like.  Oops, did I say Apple?  I meant Atlassian. ;)

[Jeannine Hooper-Yan]

I'd love for Atlassian to focus more on function and less on format.  While my Confluence pages look nicer, I've lost the power tools which are the reason I chose Confluence in the first place.

[Brad Wilkes]

Is there an environment we can use to demo the change to our internal team(s)?