4 more ways we're making it easier to find what you're looking for in Jira Cloud.

[#1]

Hi everyone!

My name is Matt and I’m a Product Manager that works on Jira Cloud. Our team’s mission is to ensure all customers can easily find what they’re looking for across all Jira Cloud products. In the past year, we have read thousands of survey responses and spoken to dozens of customers who have told us that it can be hard to navigate Jira. We're listening. And we are working really hard to make it easier for people to find what they're looking for in Jira.

I've shared some of the updates our team has been working on in a previous community post, and since then we have a lot more to share! So here’s some of the latest we’re doing to create a more seamless navigation experience in Jira.

'Your work'

We've created a new page in Jira called ‘Your work' to help you easily navigate to your issues, projects, boards, and (Jira Service Desk) queues faster. On the ‘Your work’ page, we highlight all the work you've recently viewed, been assigned to, or starred. We're hearing from many customers that they love having this as their starting point in Jira. If you’d like to make the 'Your work' page the first place you land in Jira, click on the <link> from the “…” menu. (It's easy to revert if you need to, as well). Please reach (my contact information is below) out if have feedback on this page.

An improved navigation

We've heard your feedback that you prefer the horizontal navigation experience. I'm excited to share that we are working on an improved navigation for Jira. We're still sweating the details on this, so please stay tuned for a future post from me. If you're interested, you can try out an early exploration by installing this Chrome extension. You can also read more about how we're thinking about the top nav in this community post.

Breadcrumbs in Jira

We've made breadcrumbs more useful and easier to use by making them persistent across all Jira's primary pages. Breadcrumbs are a well-known pattern for site navigation and are commonly used as a secondary navigation aid. In Jira, our breadcrumbs start with Projects, which allow you one-click access to the entire Projects directory page. We think this will make it easier than ever establish a solid footing in the product and navigate your way back to anywhere you previously were.

A convenient advanced search panel

We’ve made it so all of the ‘View all’ links from the starred, recents and search panels extend to the full-width of the page. This should save you additional clicks by enabling you to browse and peruse these pages without ever having to leave the project context (i.e., where your Backlog, Active sprints and Queues are shown).

While I hope everyone is excited as we are for some of these new features, I do want to reinforce that creating a seamless navigation experience in Jira is a journey. And your input and feedback play a vital role in helping us navigate this journey. With that said, if you have any comments feel free to leave them below or reach out to me directly at mtse[at]atlassian[dot]com.

[Lady Di]

Hi, @Matt Tse! Are you planning the same cool navigation for Jira Server / DC?

[Matt Tse]

Hi @Lady Di ,

Thanks for checking out the tips! There are no plans to be changing the navigation for Jira Server / DC. Are you currently using Jira Server / DC? If so, I'd love to better understand what's working well and not-so-well with the navigation there.

Cheers,

Matt

[Lady Di]

@Matt Tse 

 We are quite large (6000 DC), of course, the technical departments have no problems with navigation and dashboards. But it so happened that almost all the back-office processes in our company are also built-in JIRA and the users/process-owners are people who are far from IT, it is difficult for them to understand the functionality and interface of the system. (Search queries, dashboards all of this is too hard) We constantly conduct trainings in the company, training employees but it doesn’t help.

It seems to me that this option of working with tasks, as shown in your post, would make our life easier, and the life of our accountants / lawyers / hr-s.

[Matt Tse]

Hi @Lady Di ,

Apologies for the late response. Thanks for sharing the details with me. It's truly a fascinating use case that I haven't seen much of yet amongst our Cloud customers. I'll happily pass along the feedback to our Server/DC teams so they can consider it as an option for a future release.

Moreover though, if you are interested in migrating to Cloud at some point, please do let me know and I can put you in touch with the right people!

Cheers,

Matt

[Sergio Montávez]

Hi, in order to be consistent with the Confluence similar section (.../my/recent-work) and a better wording, I think it should be called "my-work".

Thanks a lot!

Sergio

[Michael Carroll]

Jira Cloud here.  Please don't move the left-nav to a top, horizontal bar.  At a minimum, it should be a system setting.

[Rob Hartsock]

Great updates, but another one that would be amazing that I know folx have been asking for a long time is being able to set release versions in a global setting. If you have a multitude of projects, but all releasing into the same software version, it gets unruly to set them on the project level. Please, please add this functionality.

[Jade Melcher]

Agree with Michael - would love for this to be a setting but understand you likely don't want to support two experiences. We love our global sidebar! :)

[Ronald Vallenduuk]

Nice to see a return to horizontal menu. I never liked that side bar that's taking up real estate I want to use for board columns, nevermind all the extra clicks. Dropdowns for project, board and dashboard wherever I am is exactly what makes my life easier.

While you're at it, please bring back the menu for 'Boards'!

I have many boards that cover multiple projects and having to remember under which project a board lives is doing my head in.

[Bruno L. Conti]

Horizontal navigation rock's!!!

Amazing! Congratulations

[Faisal Shamim]

Thanks for Sharing @Matt Tse  , I hope Atlassian would work on improving cloud performance to compete it to speed of server.  Can you please share If there is open issue for this.  Thanks

[Tara L Conklin]

Hi @Matt Tse - thanks for the updates and great work. Regarding Cloud vs Jira server. It is disconcerting when an awesome functionality is created in one but not the other; as in the horizontal navigation listed here. I work in the healthcare industry and every single company in healthcare using Jira MUST user Jira Server because federal law requires our tools to be HIPPA compliant. With Jira, we can only get a BAA with Jira Server. My company is in the process of switching from Cloud to Jira Server for this reason. 

Granted this transition is painful at the very least (we literally have a NASA Rocket Scientist on staff and this transition is frustrating him to no end). We have no choice but to switch and having the same features across both Cloud and Server would be nice. 

Thanks - Tara

[Michael Lubavin]

Neither way is perfect, but actually just keeping it stable would be nice so we can learn it and just get used to it...

[Konstantin Demidov]

Good news but I would be more happy if you fix that annoying issue: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-69548.

[John W]

I absolutely agree with Michael Carroll about the horizontal nav bar.  Monitors are wider than they are tall.  This makes horizontal space more precious.  I already have my computer's and my browser's horizontal nav bars.  If some people want a horizontal Jira nav bar, that's fine, just give us a choice. 

[Elizabeth Wong]

Hi Matt, love the "My Work" page, and is there any plan to make it editable? I would love to be able to add "Watched", as those are request that people might want to keep an eye on.  Thanks!

[Matt Tse]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for checking out this article! Apologies for the late response.

@Michael Carroll , @Jade Melcher , @John W ,

Thanks for your feedback. I understand how important the horizontal space is for reading and overall usability. By moving the global sidebar to the top, we are increasing your horizontal screen real estate by 64px. I can also understand how making this an option to have either the sidebar or the top bar would be ideal, but it is not something that we can maintain in a scalable or systematic way. It also introduces potential performance problems that we definitely want to avoid.

If you have any other thoughts to share as to why you prefer the current navigation UI, I'd love to hear them!

@Rob Hartsock ,

That's an interesting suggestion and one I've only just heard of. I haven't been here long enough to know the context behind why we haven't done it, but I'll pass along the feedback to the teams that are working on the Releases/Fix Versions experience.

@Faisal Shamim ,

Thanks for the feedback Faisal! Performance is top of mind for us and we are working hard to improve it within Jira Cloud. A colleague of mine wrote a bit more about the changes we've made so far; I'd encourage you to give this a read if you haven't already: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/6-ways-we-ve-improved-performance-in-Jira-Cloud/ba-p/1118182.

[Matt Tse]

@Tara L Conklin ,

Hi Tara, thanks for sharing your experience with me. We try our best to keep our Cloud & On-premise offerings as close as possible, but it can be difficult to stay synchronized given the nature of how the products have evolved over time. I can't make any promises that the changes we've made in Cloud will make it over to Server/DC, but I will certainly speak with my colleagues who work in those products to see what might be possible.

@Michael Lubavin ,

One of our key values at Atlassian is to do right for our customers. In this instance, we received overwhelming feedback from customers that the current navigation in Jira Cloud was limiting. To do right for you we designed a new navigation that over 95% of early testers preferred over the current one. We understand that change can be tiresome. To minimize the impact of this change we want to put you in the driver seat and give you flexibility when you roll out the change. I recently wrote more about the new navigation, which you can find more info about here.

@Konstantin Demidov ,

Thanks for sharing Konstantin! I've passed along your feedback to my colleague who works on the issue view experience.

@Elizabeth Wong ,

Hey Elizabeth, really glad that you're finding the page useful. We've definitely heard similar feedback about making the page more customisable. Interesting thoughts on the 'Watched' aspect. Would you be interested in chatting with us so we can get some more detail? If so, feel free to send me an email at mtse[at]atlassian.com. Thanks!