An update on Jira Software customer feedback – June 2022
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28 September 2022: Thanks for your interest in helping us shape and improve Jira Software. There's a new Update on Jira Software customer feedback – September 2022 now available, so this older article may no longer be actively monitored. |
Hello Atlassian Community!
Feedback from customers like you has helped us shape and improve Jira Software. As Head of Product, Jira Software, I wanted to take this opportunity to share an update on some common feedback we’ve heard from customers – and some of the areas we are focusing on to address it.
Usability and efficiency
”The shortcuts that existed in the old issue view no longer exist in the new issue view. This makes editing issues much less efficient. Particularly the change to the menu that is opened by pressing the period key. If there are new hotkeys they are not made very clear.”
We’re committed to ensuring our customers can perform core tasks effectively and efficiently. So, we’ve taken on board feedback where in some areas, the look and feel of the UI may interfere with this. Or where customers told us they can find the experience unintuitive or difficult, meaning it can sometimes take time to learn how to use Jira Software effectively.
To assist with focusing on your work and increase efficiency when you update and edit issues, we recently shipped the ability to resize the right-hand sidebar of the issue view and a sticky editor header for description fields to help customers who have lots of information in their issues to edit more easily. Longer-term, we're exploring inline editing and improving our bulk editing capabilities. We’ll share more closer to the release dates of these new features.
For power customers who tell us they want more keyboard shortcuts, we’ve been working on bringing new hotkeys to Jira:
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“d” – opens the “change status” dropdown
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“q” – opens the time tracking modal
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“s” – opens the “share” dropdown
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“s” then “t” – sends to the top on boards and backlog
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“s” then “b” – sends to the bottom on boards and backlog
You can also use the left and right arrow keys to switch between the left and right panels of the issue view, then use the up and down arrow keys to scroll each section.
We're continuing to explore the best ways to make sure that the shortcuts we bring to Jira meet your needs. In the meantime, you can stay across new keyboard shortcuts through the Help menu or by pressing “?” in Jira.
To offer users who create issues in Company-Managed projects a greater level of consistency, we’ve revisited the success flags triggered. In coming months, we’ll continue to standardize the process of creating issues with more meaningful flags that takes the user to the most relevant location post-issue-creation and highlights the issue(s) created from various locations in the product.
We’re also getting ready to implement a new dockable and minimisable modal, giving users the flexibility to navigate around Jira to find the information they need while creating a new issue.
Going forward, we’ll continue to invest in making Jira Software easier to use and go deeper into usability enhancements like standardizing UX patterns in various areas, starting with bringing consistency into filtering issues and adding more in-product help content to assist users with learning the product.
We’ve also been working to improve our onboarding to speed up the learning process.
Some customers have told us they want changes In Jira Software to be represented without refreshing the page or auto-refresh in order to provide real-time feedback as to what's already been done in their Jira instance. At this stage, there are no immediate plans to work on auto-refresh in Jira Software.
We know that copying or cloning issues in Jira Software should be straightforward and easy to complete, so we conducted research to understand the current state of cloning in Jira Software and benchmark its ease of use against other products. We’ll pair that research with insights from customer feedback and surveys and share more when work to clarify the best approach is underway.
We’ll share more via Community and our Cloud Roadmap as we have more detail on the solution and timelines for creating, copying or cloning issues, making bulk editing easier and templates in Jira Software.
Lastly, should links open in a new tab or in the same tab by default? You’ll find that half of the products you use will open links in a new tab, and the other half will open in the same tab.
At Atlassian, we believe that in most scenarios, opening a link in the same tab by default is the right choice – because you, as a user, can still open links in a new tab easily if you want to (cmd/ctrl + click or right-click + ‘open in a new tab’). That said, you’ll come across a handful of experiences in our products where you’ll find ‘open in a new tab’ to be the default. These exceptions have been made deliberately, often based on great customer feedback and in some scenarios where that behavior makes more sense.
But even for those experiences, nothing is set in stone and the more feedback we receive from you, the better our decisions will be, so thank you for your feedback and keep it coming!
Representing work
”There's too much of a disconnect between legacy projects and next-gen projects. The roadmapping functionality should be improved and allow for overviews of multiple projects in one view. The rich text editing capabilities have improved, but I often see different experiences depending on which way I'm looking at an issue.”
Some Advanced Roadmaps customers have shared challenges they've encountered with multiple concepts of ‘Team'. We’ve heard this leads to confusion as to what Team concept to adopt broadly and may affect how they use Atlassian Teams (in the People dropdown) in Advanced Roadmaps.
To address these challenges, we’re working on a major unification of Team concepts, so that the team you plan with will be used consistently across all your Atlassian products. When this rolls out, the unification of teams should be seamless and Atlassian Teams will have parity functionality in Jira with what we currently provide with Shared Teams.
Longer-term, we’ll be working on building further capabilities to better coordinate multiple teams and projects. This work will provide improved visibility across multiple teams at scale and we’ll continue to provide you with regular updates in Community.
We hear from some customers that there’s confusion about why there are two different project types within Jira Software and how to know which project type is right for them.
The most important difference to keep in mind is how these project types are set up and configured. Team-managed projects can be created by anyone and managed by a project admin - for example, changes to workflows and issue types can be changed by the team themselves and don’t affect any other projects. Company-managed projects are best when the administration needs to be more centralised. For example, workflows and issue types can be standardised across many projects. There are also some more advanced feature capabilities - such as cross-project boards and multiple boards in a project - which are currently only available in company-managed projects. Find out more here.
We’ve heard the feedback that there’s a strong desire for more powerful features in team-managed projects while maintaining their autonomous and easy-to-configure nature.
We’ll continue to focus heavily on this in the near future, by bringing the board and backlog experiences much closer together across the team-managed and company-managed project types (and don’t worry - we aren’t taking anything away!)
We recently rolled out custom filters to the board and backlog, next we’ll be enabling teams to work on multiple or parallel sprints at the same time from the same backlog, and after we’ll allow you to set fields in the project as required. Parallel sprints are a great way to organise two streams of work within a team from the same backlog. Whilst this may not be textbook scrum, we understand it can be a more lightweight option for teams than creating multiple boards in Company-managed projects with quick filters. And required fields are a great way to enhance the quality of information captured on an issue to help ensure that piece of work meets expectations when completed. Keep an eye on the Cloud Roadmap for updates on when these will ship.
On the topic of multiple boards, customers also shared that when you have a number of teams working closely together and want to control your own work processes and practices in a self-contained space – creating a board per team or workstream within the same project can give you the best of both worlds. We had hoped to bring support for the multiple boards capability to Team-managed projects over the next year, but we've paused on this specific capability to redirect our efforts on scale, performance and reliability. This was a difficult decision to make and will no doubt cause frustration for those of you who have been eagerly awaiting this capability in Team-managed projects and we apologize for this.
As well as increasing the power within Team-managed projects, there’s also work underway by several teams to bring the longer-term vision for both company-managed and team-managed projects closer together by consolidating how core experiences like issue search, issue create, work hierarchy and more work across the two project types. We’ll continue to provide regular updates through the Community and our Cloud Roadmap on this journey.
Using the Editor
”Forcing images into square containers within the description introduces a ton of unnecessary white space and takes control of the layout away from the user. Please allow images embedded in the description to maintain their natural aspect ratio while not losing the ability to resize them. Thanks”
We’ve heard a mix of feedback from customers who want a better experience re-sizing and manipulating images, adding and referencing attachments and collaborating on Media with sharing, commenting, and reactions.
Our recent focus has been on improving the reliability, scale and performance of Media and we’ve made huge strides in our reliability when uploading a file, viewing a file on a page and previewing. We can now support much larger Cloud instances, aligning with Atlassian’s commitment to larger and larger Cloud instances.
We’ve done a massive amount of work reducing Media’s bundle size, to contribute a much faster experience in Cloud and we plan to start addressing features related to manipulation, capture and collaboration on Media.
We’ll continue to improve reliability, performance and scale, along with the Enterprise features needed to ensure customers know their compliance needs are met in Atlassian’s Cloud products. There’s more detail in New year, better performance in cloud and we’ll continue to provide regular updates in Community and on our Cloud Roadmap.
Navigation and search
“I want to find issues I have been working on, and I think I’m clicking the right buttons, but I’m not seeing them.”
Some customers have identified particular needs for better filtering capabilities in team-managed boards and roadmaps, while others expressed their desire to have more fields that can be used in a search to find the right information faster and easier
We recently shipped custom filters in team-managed projects, enabling customers to find issues faster on the board and backlog. If you’ve used the quick filters feature in company-managed projects before, custom filters will feel familiar. It’s our solution to a busy board and backlog, to help you quickly find the issues you’re looking for.
Among customers who give us feedback on the quality of search results, some shared examples of searches failing to return what they’re looking for, too many, too few or inconsistent results. We’ve also learned that some customers are more likely to use Board search as the pathway to find a specific issue, rather than global search which presents a more sophisticated way to find issues.
We’re currently exploring the best way to improve JQL Phrase Search so that we can provide more accurate results when searching for a phrase.
We understand that some customers would like to see JQL have more functionality, but our primary focus for JQL search is on improving the performance and scalability. Given this focus, we recommend customers use any apps that may provide them with the additional functionality they require.
In the longer run, we will continue to improve the relevance of JQL search results and we're also looking into improving the discoverability of already supported JQL functions supplied by apps. Follow our Cloud Roadmap to stay up-to-date on how work is progressing.
Set up, configuration and administration
“User management is difficult on a specific project due to restrictions built into roles that are assigned to users. I should be able to grant someone access as a Project Admin, even if their role restricts this by default.”
Some customers shared that without more visibility across all products, it can make it difficult to understand exactly what a user has access to and how different groups affect that user's access.
The recently released Organization-level user and group administration means that customers can now have a single location across all Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Confluence products, to manage user access. And we’re one step closer to centralizing all user access information, not just for our core products. For more detail on how we’ve simplified admin screens, read User management for cloud admins just got easier.
We plan to continue investing in granular admin roles, centralizing permissions and simplifying administration. This will be a major priority for the Cloud Administration team moving forward. You can find out more about our plans for granular admin roles and centralized permissions view via our Cloud Roadmap for Administration and Community articles.
Integrations and extensibility
“There should be a way to create custom reports without the need of a 3rd party addon (which cost more money).”
We know many customers have multiple apps that are critical to daily work; making the availability of apps on cloud critical to migrating from on-prem. To help you navigate availability for apps without cloud versions, we’ll continue to update Cloud alternatives to your Atlassian Marketplace Data Center & Server apps to recommend cloud apps, native features or Atlassian cloud products for apps where partners don't intend to build a cloud version in the near future. 89 out of the top 100 Marketplace paid apps are now available in cloud.
Moving forward, we’ll keep working with Marketplace Partners to make sure their cloud apps support your needs. We keep shipping new APIs, events and investing in app security and reliability programs. Nearly 300 cloud apps are now Cloud Fortified with additional security programs, support standards, and reliability processes. For more detail on Cloud Fortified apps, visit Marketplace App Trust.
A number of customers share their expectations that some of the features provided by apps should be available as native functionality. We intend to keep investing in core features to meet your evolving needs, while also enabling customers to add more advanced or specifically-tailored functionality with Marketplace apps.
We’ve already made several improvements in Jira Cloud to include functionality available via apps-only for on-prem customers. We shipped an announcement banner for admins to notify users about system-wide changes and rolled out the burndown insight for Jira Software to all customers with scrum projects. We also offer the burndown report for customers who want to compare historical sprint burndowns, which is available by clicking ‘Reports’ in the left-hand nav.
Our next focus is delivering Story-level issues on the roadmap, Sprint Burndown and Blocked Issue Insight for agile teams on Jira; along with Atlassian Analytics for insights across projects, instances and products.
For more information on what we have planned visit the Cloud Roadmap for Jira Software or visit the Atlassian Marketplace to find out which apps offer a FREE version for teams of up to 10 users. It’s over 900 cloud apps and counting.
Many of our customers tell us they rely on APIs in order to customize and automate their work, but some of the actions available for on-prem products cannot be performed in Cloud. We're making good progress in shipping critical APIs for Jira and we'll continue our focus on this area. The recently shipped APIs for workflow configuration and custom fields resulted in multiple new apps on the Atlassian Marketplace and in-house workflow customizations.
Other customers tell us they want more flexibility on app pricing, so they can customize their Atlassian products according to their needs.
In addition to the recently released FREE price point for 1-10 users on Atlassian Marketplace, we’ve launched new pricing tiers and also reduced the price multiple from $.05 to $.01, so partners can get more granular with pricing for larger companies.
Apps and integrations with third-party tools can bring tremendous value and we often hear that the ease of use of those integrations is important. Many customers also told us that maintaining control over which apps are installed on your Atlassian instances is of utmost importance.
Installation of the vast majority of cloud apps is controlled by admins. The recently released new control for end-user OAuth 2.0 (3LO) app installs, a new control toggle in the Admin Hub, allows site admins to turn off (or back on) end-user installation capabilities for OAuth 2.0 (3LO) apps.
We will continue to work with our Marketplace Partners to make the integrations seamless and smooth for the tools you use along with your Atlassian products.
You can find out more about the new control toggle for 3LO apps in the Admin Hub or check out the list of trending Jira integrations apps in the Atlassian Marketplace.
Technical performance
“Responsiveness; sometimes requires a clearing of the browser cache to get changes to reflect onscreen.”
Many customers share your expectations for how Atlassian products should perform and support your teams at scale. This feedback drives our continued investment in these areas.
We've identified and remedied many of the contributing factors that can impact technical performance. For instance, we found that specific browsers and their versions impact performance. Various cyber security software that intercepts Atlassian traffic and downgrades it from HTTP2.0 to HTTP1.1 contribute to latency because they hamper our capability to exploit parallelism offered by HTTP2.0.
You’ve also shared that when pages don’t load or respond as quickly as expected, it impacts your ability to be able to work quickly and efficiently.
We've led numerous projects in the last two years to consistently improve the page load and response times for all the cohorts while expanding our scale in Cloud. As a result, we’ve managed to deliver a 20-25% improvement in performance for most of the key experiences in Jira (Issue View, Classic Boards, Classic Backlog, Dashboard).
We’ll continue to share our progress on these in our Cloud Roadmap and Cloud Performance and Scale updates each quarter.
We deeply value the feedback that you share with us. We focus time, effort, and investment to progress these areas but we know there’s always more to do. We’ll continue sharing the work in progress on our Cloud Roadmap and you’ll see an article like this in Community each quarter. Thank you again for all of your support and feedback.
Megan
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Head of product for Jira Software Cloud
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