What just happened to Confluence Cloud?

[david metzler]

Dear Atlassian,

Your new interface sucks.  I'm sure you are chalking all these comments upto the price of integration across platforms and whiners.  But it sucks.  I need spaces as they were, as others have already commented.  And really - too much trouble to leave a search box?  A universally understood idea that any user can find?  Brilliant idea - move it under an icon and then clutter it up with 'recent times' and 'recent spaces'.  What a cluster-suck.

[Susan Hauth [Jira Queen]]

Dear Atlassian,

If I was to peruse the list of voted features in JAC, pretty sure there wasn't anything voted up like "remove page tree from sidebar because it slows things down"

Please stop changing the UI every release and concentrate on the issues that are sitting with 500+ votes.  That's what your user community wants, not to learn ANOTHER UI that some designers and developers dreamt up in an obvious bubble.

Please leverage the involved community to participate in proposed drastic UI changes early on and not after you have released them.

Please stop concentrating on "Pretty" instead of "Functional".  

Susan (AUG Leader, AUG Council Member, QUAD Committee Council Member, Atlassian User for 9 years and who was completely blindsided by this new UI).

[Helen Griffith]

Another issue. In the (largely hidden) page tree, to see a long page name, you need to expand the side bar or click to open the page to see the full title. It used to be that the page name would fit (to a certain length—the new font is bigger) or hovering over the name revealed the full title.

I have users who HATE the new UI. These are very tech-savvy users and not just people afraid of change...

[Bruno Miretti]

Hi Liron

you said :"Once you are on 'Pages' in a specific space, it will always then remember that this was your last top item visited and take you there next time you go to that space. So, the extra click to get to 'Pages' should be saved on subsequent visits to the space. Is this not happening for you?"

I'm sorry to tell you this does not work for anonymous users (all our customers accessing our documentation) and the search button that should show me the latest visited pages gives no history. So now the sidebar cannot be customized and the space shortcuts are not displayed anymore in all pages, it's a pain to get back to a parent space. I have to try to add these options in the space header which is not even displayed anymore in the overview page and I don't talk about the display issues I'm facing with the use of section/column in the header. As I already said bugs are acceptable, removal of useful functions is not.

[Helen Griffith]

Wow, seriously?!!?!? They have no idea what impact their changes are making.

They've changed the URLs from, for example:

https://newvoicemedia.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DP/Quality+Management

to:

https://newvoicemedia.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DP/pages/230401873/Quality+Management

This has caused a problem for me... I used to just change the space key to jump from the same page in my dev space to my public space. Instead, I now have to remove the page id and change from 'spaces' to 'display'. One tiny edit to three.

I emailed about this and they told me it was part of a bigger change... this change I guess.

For a short while I could click on the page title to get the simpler URL, but yesterday that disappeared too.

I've long known that this is the wrong tool for our public facing documentation and this is yet another leap away from what I need...

[Jonathan Churchman]

I'll take user experience over performance, 9 times out of 10.  I'd prefer to cruise in a Bentley, than speed along in a Fiat 500.

[Martin Sauter]

Hey Liron

Thanks for your feedback. Let me quickly reply to some of these points:

As I said, there were improvements in the last days and I really appreciate these. On the other hand, I can not confirm that «the new navigation still offers times better performance and page loads than the old» – my experience so far was just the other way round.

Yes, once you have clicked on «Pages» in a specific space this is the default next time you open that space. But then the space home page is not visible anymore and you have to click again to bring it back. Having the page tree on the left and the home page on the right was simply perfect. It's the same principle like on any webpage: Present the home page plus a navigation at the same time. Why hide either of them?

Regarding the page order: I added this point later after reading this: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/Cannot-sort-drag-links-in-Confluence-Space-sidebar/td-p/624364#M302

But now that I am thinking about it I am not sure that it was ever possible do reorder pages directly in the page tree. And maybe it's not a good idea anyway, because people could rearrange pages accidentially while browsing.

- Martin

[Liron]

Hey, 

Martin I actually replied to an email thread we have open, but just for the benefit of others- regarding the issues you mentioned -

• The new page tree takes significantly more time to load. (Atlassian made some improvements here recently, but still.) <----- We are working on improvements to the page tree. The new navigation still offers times better performance and page loads than the old , and so overall the experience performance wise is better. Nevertheless, this complaint does not go unnoticed.
• It is not instantly visible when you open a space, you have to click the «Pages» icon first, and even then it does not appear in the sidebar, but on the right hand side. <---- Once you are on 'Pages' in a specific space, it will always then remember that this was your last top item visited and take you there next time you go to that space. So, the extra click to get to 'Pages' should be saved on subsequent visits to the space. Is this not happening for you?
• When I find a page through full text search, quite often the page tree does not unfold, so I don't see the position of that page in the page hierarchy. <--- I've logged this as a bug. Looks like its happening but only on some edge cases, we are adding it to our current sprint. 
• You can not manually rearrange the page order in the page tree anymore. <---- There actually is a more prominent Reorder Pages button than before now that allows you to reorder pages. It exists when you click on "Pages" in your space and its in the top right . 

Hope this helps.

[Till Noever]

"dev team really believe that in the long run, after our customers get used to the new layout, our customers will get more tasks done and faster"

Seriously? Have they done any research to back that up, or is this just faith in their own beliefs? This what happens when developers and designers loser touch with reality.

[Till Noever]

"millennial-developer mentality"

Yep. It's real.

[Till Noever]

Ditto on the 'sell to the business' thing. We're trying to get everybody to use this as the go-to-point-of-truth and buy-in is not easy, especially since we have a very diversely populated business. The latest changes make me feel like a hypocrite when I try to point out the features of Confluence that make it so useful and overall loveable. 

The only thing that I can say with a straight face is to paraphrase Winston Churchill. "Worst product, except for all the others."

[Michael Corvin]

I tried to add in the latest email exchange I had with Atlassian regarding the issue I opened about the UI.

Excerpt:

"...This is valuable feedback and I have forwarded this issue to my manager, the dev team behind the new look as well as the Product Manager, so rest assure that your feedback is being heard, as well as any other feedback throughout all our channels (Community, public bug tracker, Tweeter, etc).

This change isn't just about the looks, the dev team really believe that in the long run, after our customers get used to the new layout, our customers will get more tasks done and faster, this is our main goal with the change..."

My response was basically, why does the dev team believe users will get 'more tasks done and faster'?

It is evident from this heated thread that the dev team has missed many critical use cases, worse, they've broken existing use cases that many users depend on and have invested a huge amount of knowledge capture using, often over many years (as we have).

[Michael Corvin]

test... (a perfectly normal comment I tried to add keeps getting blocked)

[Michael Corvin]

I totally &^%(@#&%^@(*^&#@(*^& agree about this (*^%@*)&%^#@(*&_(*^&@...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, but not for a long time - the impression I get was years rather than months.  Possibly long enough to get the functions we actually want back!

[Susan Hauth [Jira Queen]]

Hi Martin,

It's been updated.  The only way it will get reviewed is if we get a LOT of noise in there.  I have added in a pointer back to these conversations.  Please vote and make noise in the issue.

Susan

[Martin James]

@Susan Hauth [Jira Queen] Is this going to be reviewed. I find a lot of the tickets in Jira eventually collects dust with no action.

[Martin James]

Is this going to be rolled out to Server customers?

The harsh blue colours and confusing navigation will completely frustrate our users. This won't go down well with our organisation.

Has anyone got any screenshots or a video captures yet? 

[Helen Griffith]

Ditto. The sidebar is an ESSENTIAL element... It was bad enough when the last design change happened and the sidebar became restricted, full of features I don't want or need. I'm still reeling from that!

[Susan Hauth [Jira Queen]]

Everyone, Please add these comments and vote for:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-56841

[Helen Griffith]

AGGGGHHHHHHH!

I rely HEAVILY on the page tree - well, more the sidebar as I'd customized the page tree such that it worked for us. I need to COMPLETELY design my customer-facing product documentation space so that users can find pages...

Why does Confluence do this, simply take away MAJOR features? Is there any way to get prior notification of these changes?!

[Bruno Miretti]

I tried to opt out and found all the bugs and issues I have now with the new interface were gone... but I had to get back to the new "cool and amaaaaazing" interface because all our customers who access our documentation are anonymous users and then cannot opt out so I need to find solutions.

I really like Confluence, I use it very often and I ask my team to use it as much as they can. I can accept bugs, it's hard to accept several bugs but it is not acceptable to have features we had that are now removed. I really have other things to do than spending my time finding workarounds to the features I used and that were very helpful.

[Bruce Reeler]

I love the way Atlassian asks for comments on the Confluence interface "update", and every time you opt out and go back to the old one, they ask for reasons, even asking if the can contact you w.r.t. your comment.

And then they ignore user input. "Take their money, ignore their requests" seems to be the way some successful software companies are going when they get a large enough user-base.

User experience has no place when all that matters is simplistic code-reuse and getting code out the door ASAP.

Welcome to the millennial-developer mentality. 

[Adam James]

I'd also like to voice my displeasure.   The left nav is used as our primary form of navigation.   Making that non-configurable adds unnecessary clicks to the experience (no page tree), and adds features that are not used (Blog).   Please make this area configurable again.   In a Wiki, Function >>>> Form.

[Michael Corvin]

Totally agreed!

I've also been a fan-boy and have championed/admin'ed Confluence/JIRA in our organization.  This kind of upheaval makes it harder to 'sell', as it's a constant battle to get some of the team to use.   Making it more confusing to navigate just turns off the skeptics even more.