[Closed] Calling all Jira Cloud users! Give us feedback on our exploration of a new navigation.

[Matt Tse]

[EDIT - Dec 1, 2020]

Hi everyone!

Thank you all again for your continued interest in helping us build our products and experiences. I'm pleased to announce that the new navigation has been built and shipped to every Jira Cloud customer as of September 2020. 

Whilst this discussion will remain open, the Jira Cloud team will not be actively monitoring it. If you'd like to learn more about the navigation, please refer to our official documentation here: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/new-jira-cloud-navigation/

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Hi everyone!

My name’s Matt and I’m a product manager at Atlassian. I work in the navigation & findability space for all our Jira Cloud products. We’ve been working on trying to improve the experience and are happy to announce that we have an exploration of the navigation that you can try today.

What do you need to get started?

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

1. Be a user of Jira Software, Jira Service Desk or Jira Core (Cloud only)
2. Use Google Chrome as your primary internet browser

Instructions

All you need to do is install our Atlassian Navigation Prototype Chrome extension on your browser. Once you have, navigate to a Jira near you and refresh your browser. That's it!

What will happen?

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

We need your feedback!

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

Disabling the extension

If for some reason, you need to disable the extension you can remove the extension at any time or simply disable it from your Chrome extensions menu. 

Thanks for your time. Feel free to leave comments below or submit in-product feedback. If you’d like to chat directly, please email me at mtse[at]atlassian[dot]com.

Cheers,

Matt

[Manuel Bastardo Castellano]

Administrators too? o just simple users?

[Matt Tse]

Hey @Manuel Bastardo Castellano , admins are more than welcomed to try the extension out. It's not limited to any particular role. 

[Sherif Mansour]

Also, feel free to send it to your end-users @Manuel Bastardo Castellano if you think that will help us get a diverse range of feedback! 

[Deleted user]

When will there be support for Safari ??

[Matt Tse]

Hey @[deleted] , there are no plans for this extension to be supported on Safari browsers at this time. Because it is our very first exploration, we're starting very small and will continue to iterate based on the feedback. 

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

Hello @Matt Tse, I really like the horizontal bar experience so far! It'd be great to get a "Board" button as well - I've already sent a feedback about this :)

Will you consider adding this experience though Jira labs? Some users don't have enough rights on their computer to install a Chrome extension.

[Matt Tse]

Hey Manon! Thanks for sharing your feedback with us. We haven't landed on a final design, so I'll relay that back to the designers working on this.

In terms of making this available through Jira labs, it's not completely off the table right now but I also can't guarantee when it might come. I'll try my best to keep you and the rest of the community updated as we go further.

Cheers,

Matt

[Sherif Mansour]

@Manon Soubies-Camy would love to hear more about what part of the navigation experience do you like? Has it improved anything for you?

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

Hi @Sherif Mansour,

The horizontal bar makes it much easier to navigate through projects and issues. With the vertical one, I always feel like I'm doing too much clicks to get where I need to be. The g + g shortcut doesn't work everywhere on Jira Cloud (and it doesn't work anywhere on Confluence Cloud), so I often have to click through several menus.

Also, I have 500 users on my Jira Cloud and a lot of them don't see the + to create an issue or the 🔎 to search for issues. With the horizontal bar, the "Create" button is clear and they understand right away they need to click on Create to, well, create issues :)

[Sandra Bryant]

Good Morning Matt

Well I was expecting the view to look like this in my browser:

But instead it looks like this:

Can we get the screen to go back to the one at the top and stay there?

[Matt Tse]

Hi @Sandra Bryant ,

Thanks for sharing your feedback with us. This new issue view is an experience handled by my colleague @Yousef Abusamak and his team. He should be able to answer your question better than I can.

[Jim Highley]

My users would also like to return to the old view permanently.  This new view is definitely not helping us get more done.  Since Sandra's post has been here for 11 days with no response, should I assume there won't be one forthcoming?

[Yousef Abusamak]

Hi @Sandra Bryant  and @Jim Highley

My name is Yousef and I'm a product manager working on the new Jira issue view, I'm sorry to hear that the new view is not working the way you are team is expecting. I can help you turn it off and I would like to hear from you what is working and what is not so we can make it better. please drop me an email at yabusamak@atlassian.com and I will follow up from there.

[Sandra Bryant]

Ok I like the navigation this is great. I want to share with my team. Can we keep it?

[Matt Tse]

Yes, absolutely you can! As long as your team uses Chrome as their primary browser, they are more than welcomed to install the extension and use it for as long as they want.

Just to reiterate that this is very much an exploration at this stage so we can't make any guarantees on how long the extension will be supported. We are super grateful for the outreach and thank you so much for your time!

[Sherif Mansour]

@Sandra Bryant would love to hear why you feel the new navigation is great for you? Any specific things that stand out? 

[Scott Paden]

I can't seem to keep the Chrome plugin enabled for Jira Horizontal Navigation.  It appears to remain off even though I turned it on by clicking the button.

Here's what I did:

• Navigate to a Jira page.
• Click the Atlassian icon on my browser.
• Turn on Jira horizontal (see image below).
  
• Manipulate issues in Jira.
• Click on the Atlassian icon on my browser again.

At this point the Jira switch is off.

Am I doing something wrong?

[JD]

Hi Scott, 

Firstly thanks for your interest in trying out our navigation exploration!

We think the reason the chrome plugin keeps disabling itself is because it accesses files from our prototype server. While this is fine for most users, some companies may block certain domains. 

You could test this by using your phone as hotspot or trying on a different network and device.

Let me know how you go :)

[Robert Shirey]

Thanks for the tip. I had this problem as well and resolved it by browsing to https://prototype.guide in chrome, clicked the red security icon to the left of the URL, site settings, then select ALLOW at the bottom for Secure content. Looks like it wasn't working because the certificate for that site expired. I'm assuming because you're now rolling the new feature out. Until then, i'll use the plugin, looking good so far! Thanks! Rob

[Engin Basarslan]

How can we reach jira cloud via rest services?

[Matt Tse]

Hi Engin,

I'm not sure I understand the ask. Could you please elaborate on what you are trying to do/accomplish? Are you currently using a Jira Cloud product and interested in building an add-on? If so, we have plenty of documentation available here: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/software/rest/

[shalin]

Hello Matt,

This new navigation looks good to me on initial look, feel like community page. where is "Starred and recent" menu? also i like to have it in user configuration or some settings base instead of having this in chrome extension.

[Matt Tse]

Hi @shalin ,

Thanks for the feedback! What do you like about it so far? 

Good eye on the "Starred and recent" menu. In this exploration, we've consolidated both the starred and recent items into each respective menu dropdown that you see at the top (Projects, Filters, Dashboards, excluding Issues). 

In terms of making this available through the user configuration/settings (i.e., Jira labs), it's not completely off the table right now but I also can't guarantee when it might come. I'll try my best to keep you and the rest of the community updated as we go further.

Cheers,

[Sushant Mongia]

Hello @Matt Tse ,

I really like the horizontal view but I believe I ran into a specific bug. Once switched on, I see that the navigation bar creates a second scroll bar on the page/window. I've reported it but here's a screenshot. Looking forward to a fix and re-using it :)

Thanks

Sushant Mongia

Screenshot:

[Matt Tse]

Thanks @Sushant Mongia ! Appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback.

I'd love to understand why you like the horizontal view so far. Could you provide more details? 

[Sushant Mongia]

@Matt Tse , Sure!

Professionally Speaking:

For Confluence:

I like the conventional full screen style page for viewing my documents (as most webpages are implemented) and my preference makes me hide the side bar every time only to reopen it minutes later to create a new article (Content writing and curation tasks). So this horizontal view fits the bill and I absolutely liked it at my first try. I get to navigate all my starred spaces easily from the dropdown (BIG thumbs up), the create option is now not a "+" that I - sometimes in a rush - forget where it is and search bar onwards everything is now a proper tray!

For Jira:

All the relevant from above and more drop downs on the top left make working easier and faster! I personally keep track of few projects so a dropdown kinda adds on to making it feel closer to a desktop app.

Personally Speaking:

• The reason I like and prefer the horizontal view is, it's the most natural way of working on any number of tools. I've worked on so many tools, each one of them has some toolbar on the top. So naturally I like menu bars and toolbars on the top of the screen.
• I've been working with the Dock on Mac and Linux mounted to the left of the screen, also my Windows Taskbar on the left. Imagine the relief to not have your hidden dock in fullscreen on Mac pop up every time you try to access the Confluence and Jira toolbar. :D

Please let me know if you were looking for something specific that I might not have discovered yet!

Cheers,

Sushant Mongia

[Giovani Spagnolo]

Hi @Matt Tse  !

Thanks for sharing this prototype extension, I hope it becomes an official release into Jira Cloud soon. Our team enjoyed it a lot because we mainly work with BigGantt plugin and do regular meetings to check on the project timeline. Using your prototype extension we got a full width view for the plugin, which leaves us with plenty of space for the Gantt !

Also, top bars are kind of a standard in almost every webapp. As a suggestion you could add an icon to "auto hide" the bar or "pin it on top" (like it is now), that way if you scroll down you'll get almost a full screen real estate.

Awesome.

Cheers.

[Matt Tse]

Hey @Giovani Spagnolo ,

Thanks for trying out the prototype and sharing your feedback with us. Please feel free to share it with your colleagues and/or friends who may also be using Jira Cloud.

Great to hear you're getting more horizontal real estate to work with! I know how precious that can be, especially when working with smaller displays. If you have any other feedback as to why you enjoy the top navigation more, I'd be more than happy to hear it! 

Cheers,

Matt

[Chris Glynne]

Hi @Matt Tse 

I like the return to the top nav. It makes more sense as a top nav and I was never a fan of the move to the left nav.

Are the long term plans to roll this back into Jira/Confluence as the standard or will this approach remain as a plugin?

With the current plugin, is there an opportunity for it to respect the sidebar colours as defined in the admin settings of Jira / Confluence?

What about custom logos and icons?

Thanks

[Matt Tse]

Hey @Chris Glynne ,

Thanks for checking out the prototype! To answer your questions:

• Both our Jira and Confluence teams are exploring this further and have more testing that we'd like to do to ensure it meets the needs & expectations of our users. There are no expected timelines as to when the plugin will stop being supported, so you're welcomed to keep it on for now, in addition to sharing it more broadly with your peers.
• I can't guarantee any plans on making the extension respect the look & feel customizations that may have been set up already, but I'll definitely feed that back into the team for consideration. 

Last but not least, I'd love to better understand why you like the top navigation more. Could you tell me more?

Cheers,

Matt

[Michael Kuhl {Appfire}]

HI @Matt Tse - This is a step in the right direction in my opinion.  I have a couple of comments"

1. The navigation feedback link takes me to a google form that assumes I'm uninstalling the extension when in fact I just want to - you know - give some feedback. :)
   
2. I feel the app switcher should live to the left of the Application logo.  That makes it reasonably close to it's current placement so as to make it more easily discoverable (and also similar to the old placement).

Thanks for the opportunity to test and explore!

[Matt Tse]

Hi @Michael Kuhl {Appfire} ,

Thanks for trying out the extension!

Regarding your first comment, that sounds most certainly like a bug. Just to clarify - by "navigation feedback link", you are referring to the Navigation Feedback item in the navigation bar yes? If so, it should be rendering this modal when you click it:

  

And regarding #2, thanks for sharing your feedback around this. I'll pass this along to our team for consideration.

Feel free to share this extension with any peers/colleagues you may have. We want to get as much feedback as possible about this!

Cheers,

Matt

[Michael Kuhl {Appfire}]

@Matt Tse Yes, on the nav bar. 

Testing some more I also discovered that when I disable the new nav for Jira or Confluence (not disabling or removing the extension) it takes me to the same form immediately in the same (incorrect) manner.  In that case I was just switching back and forth in order to compare them.

[Josh Costella]

@Matt Tse 

Horizontal is so much better. Especially for orgs like mine who were used to horizontal for years on Server and with moving to Cloud, it's a great bridge between the two products. It feels much more intuitive and there are definitely less clicks to find things. The less clicks the better. Always. 

There are also a large amount of people in our org going back to the traditional issue view. (I know that's separate from this but I think it's worth mentioning.)

The differences between Server and Cloud are growing rapidly so it's nice for companies that migrate to have options like these so it lessens the impact of all the changes at one time. 

[Matt Tse]

Hey Josh,

Thanks for your feedback! We love hearing that the horizontal nav feels more intuitive and easier to use. Would you be able to elaborate on why you think it's better?

As for the traditional issue view, I'm sure my colleague would love to better understand why the new issue view isn't working so well for folks in your org. I can't seem to tag him at the moment, but I'll make sure he's watching this thread as well.

Cheers,

Matt

[Sudeshna Phukan]

Hi @Matt Tse , some great work on the horizontal nav! It looks much organized and is easier to search for spaces and projects. 

As a feedback, just wanted to ask if it is possible or already in your roadmap to include 'Edit' button on the nav? Just so that someone who is working on a Confluence page doesn't have to scroll up all the way to the top to change something at the bottom or maybe anywhere in the page.

[Matt Tse]

Hi Sudeshna,

Thanks for the feedback. Sounds like you're finding it quite useful for Confluence Cloud already. I've forwarded over your suggestion over to my colleague who works on the Confluence product.

Cheers,

Matt

[Elaine H.]

Hi  Sudeshna,

I'm the Confluence PM working on navigation.

Given that this Chrome extension is a prototype, there are a few known issues with it. One of them is that the horizontal nav covers the page menu where the Edit (pencil) icon is located. The page menu normally would show up as soon as you start scrolling towards the top of page. When working correctly, you don't need to get to the very top to edit.

We don't have plan to fix these known limitations for the prototype. When the time comes for us to build the real thing, we'll ensure usability and the correct behavior.

Does this address your feedback?

Cheers,

Elaine

[Sudeshna Phukan]

It does, thank you! And it would be great to see features like 'Edit' or 'Modify' on the nav in the future.

[David Cameron]

This is so good. The "newer" navigation made it so much harder to get around in jira. Bringing back the old style navigation is such a massive improvement.

[Matt Tse]

Hey David,

Thanks for the feedback, really appreciate it. What about the "newer" (aka current) navigation makes it hard to get around Jira? Would love to get a bit more detail so we can share this back to the team :) 

Cheers,

Matt

[David Cameron]

The new format took so much away:

• Search - you could paste a jira key into this field and go straight to the jira issue
• Search - more clicks in the new interface
• Dashboards: Unable to navigate between dashboards quickly with the new interface.
• Issue filters: as above, they were hidden away, rather than something that could be just accessed quickly
• Boards - I used to have multiple boards, some of which would span projects. Eg prioritisation boards for issues, sprint/kanban for current work, cross project view of epics. For example, you might have a board to represent work that has not yet been estimated or prioritised. You might not want that work to be visible to the dev team yet, but still want a way to manage it.

The plugins don't bring back the boards menu. While I would still like to have that back, by now I've mostly migrated the way I work to single boards per project. So I don't personally feel the pain, but boards were more useful and flexible before as they were easily acessible.

Overall the "new" UI made it really hard to navigate. For example, if I had filters to look for key issues, I couldn't get to them quickly. If you can't get to things quickly, they might as well be invisible.

The "new" UI worked if all you ever looked as one was one project. You can see one project, one board and maybe just need to search for issues in that one project. If you want anything more in depth (cross project usage, reporting on issues, prioritising issues etc), then it was a big step backwards.

One anecdote: the moment I showed the chrome plugin to the product team (5 people) and our agile coach, they immediately installed it. They're all people who need to look at more than one project

[David Cameron]

Back in the day, the team at Palm Pilot team used to count the number of taps required to get to something. It's a good metric.

The "new" UI increased the number of clicks, mouse moves etc to get from one part of jira to another. It also removed well understood UI paradigms (ie a menu along the top) and replaced it less well understood UI paradigms (left menu).

It might have looked cleaner, but it functioned less well.

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

For a moment, I thought even ex British PM uses JIRA :p - I had to check your profile haha

[Marc Bothe]

Yes, the Jira-Server style navigation was much better and more intuitive. So this new styling is highly appreciated!

[Matt Tse]

Thanks Marc! 

Really appreciate the feedback. What about the server-style navigation feels better and more intuitive? Any particular reasons and examples you could share?

Cheers,

Matt

[Алексей Тихонов]

Please tell me, how can I return to design which contains Transition Buttons in Jira cloud? I want to see all possible transitions at once and make one of them by one left click.

[JD]

Hi @Алексей Тихонов ,

This sounds like the issue view and not the navigation. Go to:

Your avatar / Settings 

At the bottom of the personal settings page you'll see a toggle for the issue view.

Thanks,
John

[Lukas Martin]

The new design is absolutely awesome for Jira. Thank You!

[Matt Tse]

Hey @Lukas Martin ,

Thanks for the feedback! Would you care to elaborate on why you think it's awesome? Anything in particular that makes it work really well for you?

[Nate Dame]

Awesome design!

BTW, on Confluence there's, literally, a "placeholder" in Apps (we don't have any Confluence apps yet). https://share.getcloudapp.com/YEuvR9gG  

[JD]

Hi @Nate Dame 

Thanks for the feedback, is there anything specific you like about the new design?


With regards to the apps menu, thanks for letting us know! This placeholder is just in the chrome plugin experiment.

Thanks,
John

[Steen Ole]

The new navigation is a vast improvement. It takes fewer clicks to switch between projects etc. and it is much more intuituve.

The old navigation concept with two navigation bars beside each other in the left side of the screen is hard to understand for users. They fail to understand the difference between the blue "general" sidebar and the grey "project-related" sidebar. Moving the general navigation to the top makes that difference much more clear.

So maybe the old navigation in JIRA server was not so bad at all... ;-)

[Steen Ole]

Quick access to boards from the new navigation is also a very wanted feature.

[Steen Ole]

It is a little strange, that the "Projects" dropdown is duplicated. It exists both in the top menu, and in the left menu (when working in a project)

[Matt Tse]

Thanks for checking out the Chrome extension! Regarding the duplication of the 'Projects' dropdown, this is known as this is currently a limitation of the Chrome extension.

The finished experience will not have the 'Projects' dropdown in the left menu :) 

More information can be found here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/A-better-navigation-for-Jira-Cloud-is-coming-soon/ba-p/1216077

[Doug Robinson]

I don't see the "Navigation feedback" button on my view, so I'll a note here. 

As a longtime JIRA server admin that had to migrate to (four) cloud instances recently.. I'm VERY HAPPY to see a familiar navigation layout!  

Everything is one click away again!  Having everything nested in the left sidebar was a painful layout. 

The one outstanding improvement I would really like is to dis-associate boards from projects and provide a "Boards" dropdown along the top (like the server version). Since most of our boards include tickets from more than one project, we don't see any benefit to hiding them under an (arbitrary) project.

Great work, thank you!

Doug

[Matt Tse]

Thanks Doug! We've heard very similar feedback from other admins and server customers. 

Regarding your comment about the disassociation of Boards from Projects, we have no plans to be changing this in the near future; however, I'll definitely take in this feedback in and surface it to the team. 

[Chellie Esters]

Hello,

I like this feature a lot! For Jira, it makes it easier to get around and move from project to project, board to board. For Confluence, it makes it easier to create pages, and it brings "Your Work" to the forefront. (I may actually access that even more now!)

For Jira:

1. I would like to see the ability to show starred Boards in the top navigation. Some projects have multiple boards, so I'd like to go straight to a single board.
2. Also, I'd like the ability to add/remove Apps. I personally don't use Apps and about half of the people (the non-developers) who use Jira here don't use Apps, but then the other half (the developers) does use Apps. That might be an area where customization may work.

For Confluence:

1. The top navigation hides anchor link jumps. When I'm proofing pages and testing that the page works, the point of the anchor link jump is hidden underneath the top nav. I'm not sure if there's code that can say "if top nav is on and anchor link is clicked, jump (current jump amount + 10 lines).
2. Also, would like to hide/show Apps. And maybe Activity.

Otherwise, good stuff so far!

Thanks for this feature!

Chellie

[Matt Tse]

Thanks for your feedback Chellie! I'll take the suggestions you've mentioned and relay them back to the teams.

Regarding the specific comment about the Apps; we've made no plans to make this customisable at an individual user-level, but this is an interesting use case. Thanks for sharing! 

If you're interested in more information about the new navigation, feel free to check out this article: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/A-better-navigation-for-Jira-Cloud-is-coming-soon/ba-p/1216077

Cheers,

Matt

[Samuel Bar]

Great improvement! It makes it easier to get around and move from project to project, board to board, and settings, in Jira and Confluence.

[Francois Tamigniau [WinBooks]]

Hi,

Url's like https://*.jira.com are not supported by the plugin.  Any chance to add this rule?

Best,

François

[Matt Tse]

Hey Francois,

This is largely a limitation because it's built as a Chrome extension. Would you mind sharing with me what it is you're trying to do?

We are working on building this experience and go into more detail here: 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/A-better-navigation-for-Jira-Cloud-is-coming-soon/ba-p/1216077

Cheers,

Matt

[Deepak Kumar]

When you have new navigation you must include new features as well like SSO with Azure AD without Atlassian Access subscription because today's world all companies offering such service free of cost and in atlassian user need to buy Atlassian access even for single product like Jira Service desk, Jira cloud, confluence etc... Customer who using only one Jira product for them it's not create that much value if they have to pay for SSO.