Description field formatting

[brent.johnson]

I'd love to see some type of formatting in the description field of a field in Jira Product Discovery. For example, we use it for I.C.E. and use the description to help standardize things like effort and value.

The first image below is how it's entered while editing and closer to what we'd like to see (it's more readable).

The second image is what's displayed to users once it's saved if you scroll over the field.

[Jimi Wikman]

I agree with that.

Should not be a big problem, changing it from a text field to an editor field.

[Tanguy Crusson]

Thanks @Jimi Wikman , just let us know when the pull request is ready 😉

Yep, good point @brent_johnson - let us see what we can do there!

[Jimi Wikman]

@Tanguy CrussonJust need access to the repo and the component libraries ;)

Jokes aside, if you can make that change, that would be great. No, make that awesome :)

[Tanguy Crusson]

@Jimi Wikman 😂

We've put it on the short list. Just to give you some insider info on this as to why things like this aren't always easy:

• We checked and this description it's not a Jira Product Discovery specific thing - it is something that's used across Jira, and it's not a rich text field. 
• Changing something for the whole of Jira (Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Jira Work Management, etc.) isn't trivial - in particular there are a number of screens this field may surface across the product and admin experience. And many teams involved owning these things. 
• However, in this case we found a way to limit the impact to Jira Product Discovery only. The solution's a bit hacky and will cause us a bit of grief later down the line
• We discussed this in the team and decided that, yes, it's worth it. The reason for that is that we want product teams to use Jira Product Discovery to share their plans with everyone (we're deep in that topic at the moment) - and a limitation like this one doesn't help with that.
• Also, we received requests from people wanting to document fields in documents (a Confluence page, a Google Doc) - e.g. to explain "these are the product areas and what they mean" in greater length. From a rich text field, that becomes easy

So, the short answer is: changes like this are not always as trivial as they may seem - but in that case we'll do it because it helps with the mission of the product. There are cases where we won't do things y'all ask that seem easy, more often than not it's because they're not !

[Jimi Wikman]

First of all, I hear you. I know all too well the pain of needing to change global components or trying to motivate breaking up an existing architecture that is restricting progress when time and money are limited. That just make me appreciate the effort you made all the more.

Secondly I really appreciate you taking the time to explain the challenges as that is an excellent way to ensure we understand why things may or may not appear as quickly as we might think.

I think this was one of the best replies I have seen in a long time to feature requests like these.

Whatever they are paying you @Tanguy Crusson it is not enough :) Keep up the awesome work and have a great day!

[Tanguy Crusson]

hahaha thanks @Jimi Wikman , your reply made my day

[J P]

I have also run into this desire / need regularly.... not just for easier reading, but I would like to add a "Learn More" link that takes users to Confluence pages that provide more training and context on the field + standard usage + model + potential training resources. 

[Tanguy Crusson]

Cool, thanks for the context @J P - it sounds like what we have planned would help you there

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

Ultimately, I think we would want to be able to not only change the description, but the values/value readouts as such, so that users can see them as tooltips, right when interacting with the field!

Picking up @brent_johnson's example:

[Mark S. Rasmussen]

Yes please! It's a hassle to remember what the individual dots translate to in human-speak, especially for those not involved in JPD on a daily basis.

[Tanguy Crusson]

That's a pretty neat idea, thanks for sharing @Jan-Hendrik Spieth !

[Tanguy Crusson]

@brent_johnson good news, it's coming very soon 🙂

[brent.johnson]

Nice! Love this :)

[Tanguy Crusson]

@brent_johnson that's it, it shipped, let us know how you go!

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

Slick @Tanguy Crusson, thanks for pulling this off so quickly!

Maybe you could let us place a divider into the description that then determines how much is visible in the header tooltip, and above the scroll? :-)

[brent.johnson]

Loving this! Thanks so much :)

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

@Tanguy Crusson Could we also have the formatted tooltips in the idea sidebar, like e.g. here, for our "Effort" field?

That would be really helpful!

Edit: oh, and on idea cards, as well ...? :-)

[Tanguy Crusson]

Thanks @Jan-Hendrik Spieth - we're discussing how to best surface that information without the Christmas tree effect of having inline popups all over the place