Calling all Confluence Cloud users! Give us feedback on a new navigation concept.

Elaine H.
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 25, 2019

[EDIT - November 12, 2019]

Hi everyone!

Thank you all for your interest and time in trying out our navigation prototype. I'm pleased to announce that our teams have been building it! We'll start rolling out the real thing in a few weeks. You can find more details here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/New-navigation-and-Home-are-coming-to-Confluence-Cloud/ba-p/1211418

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi everyone!

I'm Elaine. I’m a product manager for Confluence Cloud.

We’ve been working on a few initiatives to improve your experience with navigating in Confluence. We are excited to announce that the prototype of a new navigation experience is ready for you to try today.

Screenshot with top nav.png

 

What do you need to get started?

To be eligible for this prototype you'll need to:

  1. Be a user of Confluence (Cloud version only)
  2. Use Google Chrome as your internet browser

 

Instructions

All you need is to install our Atlassian Navigation Prototype Chrome Extension on your Chrome browser. Once you're done, go to your Confluence as usual and refresh your page if needed. That's it!

 

What will happen?

Navigating in Confluence now will use our new navigation prototype. Everything should work as it used to and you can keep using Confluence as normal. Please note that if you are also a Jira Cloud user, you can toggle on/off a similar experience for Jira.

 

We need your feedback!

We'd love your input to shape the future of Confluence Cloud together. If you have any general feedback, bug reports, ideas or suggestions, we'd love to hear from you! Simply click the "Navigation Feedback" button in the navigation and your feedback will go straight to us!

nav_feedback.png

 

Disabling the Chrome extension

If for any reason you want to disable this Chrome extension, you can remove it or simply disable it from your Chrome extension's menu at any time.

Chrome extension.png

 

Thank you for your time. Feel free to leave comments below or submit in-product feedback.

10 comments

Davin Studer
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July 25, 2019

I've never been fond of the cloud left hand navigation bar. This brings back the familiar top nav bar, with a few changes, but for the most part it works like it used it. I feel like I've gotten back a long lost friendship.

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Sherif Mansour
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 25, 2019

@Davin Studer any thoughts why you prefer this over the left? What stands out for you?

Davin Studer
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July 25, 2019

I just feel like it is not a very intuitive navigation system. Years and years of consistent re-reinforcement in desktop apps and especially web apps have ingrained in me that your main navigation should be at the top. Having it on the left goes against all that and I think it confuses users. Yeah, you can get used to it, but you have to un-train years ox experience. Take this site for instance. Main nav is on the top.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
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July 25, 2019

Just pointed one of my smaller clients to this (because they've been complaining about being able to find functions since migrating to Cloud a few months ago).  Ok, only 18 users, but in the space of an hour, 5 of them have come back with "this works" and requests for it to work in other browsers!

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Sherif Mansour
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 25, 2019

Thanks for sharing this out further, mate! 

If you get a chance to speak to the client, we'd love to hear why they think it's better for them? What specifically stood out? 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 25, 2019

Based on some quite short comments as part of a meeting that was about something totally unrelated to UI, I got a feeling they liked two things

Having words in the menu instead of having to guess what icons might do (hovering help text is great, but not fast enough to tell you what an icon does instantly)

Whilst a couple of them read right-to-left, and would prefer a different order in the bar (but are also used to working in a mostly left-to-right world), they were very clear that "main" options make sense as a header, not a side-bar.  Side-bars are for options and details on the current stuff, headers are for "global" things.

Give us a bit more time though.  One of their people is a bit of an Atlassian fan-person, and has volunteered to do a test - she's promised to spend a couple of days doing her job with the current Cloud, and then add the plugin and do the same.  I've asked her to post what she thinks here, but it won't be until the end of next week.

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James Dellow
Community Leader
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July 25, 2019

Having words in the menu instead of having to guess what icons might do

This has been the problem with other intranets I've seen where they've tried to do this - icons gives the content more room, but people don't know what the icons mean.

Side-bars are for options and details on the current stuff, headers are for "global" things.

And agree that's the mental model people have - top navigation is the whole site, the left-hand is the space you are in.

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James Dellow
Community Leader
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July 25, 2019

My thoughts are exactly the same as @Davin Studer

I realise there is currently a trend towards having a left-hand navigation in other competing wiki-like products and some other collaboration tools I'm familiar with. A primary left-hand nav may also work better for other parts of the Atlassian stack (e.g. I think it works quite well in Bitbucket).

But for Confluence, which is all about content organised in pages in spaces, the top navigation just makes it easier to use. I've also worked on many intranet projects using other CMS that have tried and failed to use a left-hand navigation as the primary navigation.

Obviously the challenge for Cloud is creating a cohesive UI system that link each part together, but I don't believe it needs to be homogenous across all the products.

Maybe I'm also being biased, but I think when my app (News for Confluence Cloud) is used as the dashboard it also looks much better on a page without the left-hand navigation 😀.

PS you just need something better to replace waffle icon - they are notoriously bad for usability.

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Sherif Mansour
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 29, 2019

Thanks for the feedback, @James Dellow - very useful perspective. 

Any further feedback just use the in-app feedback you use the extension. 

Like James Dellow likes this
Lucy Minato July 28, 2019

I agree that the left panel for navigation between pages in a space and top panel for the “doing stuff” menu is good. I think it’s less confusing with only one panel on the left – navigation on the left and main menu on the top.

After a bit of testing, my feedback (so far) is that I now question the choice of options in the top menu for non-logged in users. I don’t think they should have the "Your Work", "People" or "Create" options, these should only be available once a user is logged in. (I’ve only just noticed that there is the “Create” button in the current Confluence for non-logged in users.)

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Sherif Mansour
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 29, 2019

Thanks for the feedback, @Lucy Minato - this isn't by design but just a limitation of the prototype we are testing. The main thing we want to understand is the impact of moving the navigation to horizontal. 

If/when we go ahead with this, the Confluence team will make sure the anonymous usage is part of this thinking. 

Lucy Minato July 29, 2019

Thanks for the clarification @Sherif Mansour

Helen Griffith July 28, 2019

A very quick first glance, this looks better. It reduces the clutter in the left-hand navigation, leaving that for one thing—page navigation—only.

And as I type, I see that my next comment is exactly the same as @Lucy Minato's above! Anonymous users shouldn't see anything they can't use. In my case, all anonymous users can do is switch between two spaces. 

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Helen Griffith July 29, 2019

Another issue I've found.

To top bar hides the Edit | Save | Watch | etc. buttons when I scroll down a page. I can see the bottom one or two pixels, and can click on those pixels to edit the page for example, but it's not much use if you're not familiar with the buttons and their location!

Lucy Minato July 29, 2019

For me, those buttons stay at the top of the page in the current & new setup so they aren't visible as soon as I move down the page, that hasn't changed. But your comment does remind me that this is a bit of a pain when using long pages as you have to go to the top of the page to access those items (e.g. if you're mid-way through reading a page and then want to make some edits).  

Helen Griffith July 30, 2019

I've switched back to the original design and yes, the buttons disappear when I scroll all the way down, but scrolling up even a tiny fraction makes the buttons appear.

Back to the new design and scrolling up back the buttons appear, but hidden under the top bar. Weirdly, a few more of the pixels appear today!

The image shows the buttons when I scroll up; they ARE there, but hidden.deleteMe.png

Elaine H.
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 2, 2019

@Helen Griffith What you have experienced is a known limitation of this Chrome extension prototype. If/when we go ahead with this new navigation, we will make sure that existing functionality like this (the behavior of Edit | Save | Watch | etc. buttons when scrolling a page) will be preserved if not improved.

Thank you for continuously sharing your feedback.

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Jack Brickey
Community Leader
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August 16, 2019

I prefer the LH sidebar and definitely want it to stay. If you want to make it configurable so people can choose that would be fine but I would not be in favor of switching back. I like that I can now collapse the sidebar to regain screen if needed.

James Dellow
Community Leader
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August 18, 2019

But you could collapse the sidebar before?

Elaine H.
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 19, 2019

@Jack Brickey , thank you for sharing your feedback!

By "I prefer the LH sidebar", did you mean after trying the Chrome extension prototype you consider LH better than top nav? What particular aspects of the LH sidebar do you find superior than top nav?

With top nav, you can still collapse the gray space navigation sidebar when in a space. This won't change. Which particular sidebar or part of the sidebar would you like to be able to collapse?

Cody Stevens
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August 23, 2019

I'm trying to decide which one I like better and it's honestly pretty tough. I have been working almost exclusively in server for the last 3 months so it's nice to have a similar layout in cloud. 

I think the left-hand sidebar is more aesthetically pleasing because of the simple icons without text and the general size of the navbar. It's clean and easy to use once you have it down. However, the new navbar has quicker access to things like projects and dashboards. 

Overall, I would say this navigation bar should be fully integrated into the cloud. I do think it should be a toggle option though. I don't think this should replace the other navbar. For new users, you could have them configure this when they are logging in for the first time. For already existing users, it could be in their personal settings. 

James Dellow
Community Leader
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August 23, 2019

Choice would be great. I suspect, from a support and support documentation perspective, they'll want a single UI pattern. However, I would actually like more options to customise the Cloud UI than is currently supported by themes - maybe not as extreme as server but more flexibility than we currently have.

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Lucy Minato November 6, 2019

I've just noticed that I can't view the history of a page when I use the Atlassian Navigation Extension and I use the horizontal navigation. I get the "Page History" option at the top right under the ellipsis but if I click I just get a blank page. Anyone else getting this same behaviour? 

Tal Levi November 18, 2019

Hey @Elaine H. :)

Love the new navigation, but I've come across a few bugs and I can't seem to find the feedback button mentioned above:

1. Pressing the / key opens the search in the left side of the screen, while on click it opens to the right - It's weird.

2. Projects didn't load for me a few times

3. There's another scroll that's a bit annoying:

image.png

 

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