Anyone else hate the new jira experience?

[dgbrenner]

The new jira experience is full of bugs and inefficiencies.  I had it turned off, but now it looks like I'm stuck with it for good.  Is that true that I can't use the old one anymore.

For me it's really awful- bad enough that i would consider dumping jira.  

Several issues

1- Navigation is really hard

2- The search filters are hard to get to

3- The drop downs for assigned to and for priority don't consistently work with auto fill, and clicking the dropdown doesn't always show the list either.  this is the WORST of the problems.

Anyone else agree?

[Ory Purhonen]

Whoever came up the design should be fired. Absolutely horrible to navigate and the documentation hasn't been updated - so it's impossible to find how to do setting changes.  Jira used to be an extremely easy to use piece of technology. Now it's turned to shit. 

[Ian Main]

All true words - sad because I used to love it.

[Robert Curtiss]

I'm relieved to see that I'm not alone in my suffering as I struggle to learn how to use Jira. I don't have the experience of using an older version; I just started recently.

The documentation is the most confusing stuff I've ever read. I'm using the Cloud version, but the documentation I've found for the Cloud version ... I just don't have the words to express how bad it is. It's almost as if it was written by 50 different people who each wrote a different part, and then threw it all together in no particular order. Every section I read uses terminology that hasn't been defined yet, and references to other sections in a willy-nilly free for all. So I'm reading the server version and that at least is somewhat organized.

Where's the step-by-step 'Getting Started' guide for new admin users who need to setup a project?

And who came up with the terminology, with names like: Software Development Issue Type Screen Scheme I can barely read it and make sense of it, let alone say it out loud to any of my co-workers. Say it three times quickly: Screen Scheme, Screen Scheme, Screen Scheme. Are they tripping, or what?

The worst thing is that I have to search the web to find tutorials written by non-Atlassian folks who have been kind enough to spend their time sharing knowledge.

[Eiko Pugh]

Seriously agree with Ory Purhonen.

I configure/ customize JIRA for projects, now I feel lost. Project members are updating incorrect statuses etc...

Very disappointed...

[Justin Auch]

I just started using it as it's the industry standard tool. I've used a lot of PM tools and this is the only one that feels like it's intentionally made to be difficult to use and configure. I switched it from "new view" to "old view" in the personal settings and that was an improvement... but still not great. Next gen projects look like they have potential, but not useable until time estimation/tracking and proper reporting are added. Kind of appalled that this is considered the industry standard PM tool tbh.

[RicardoAraya]

Its full of bugs, nothing works as is should be... it s annoying!!!
The good old plugins simply dont work.

For instance, you cant put 3 macros, one inside another now... and thats a really basic funcionallity needed in CONFLUENCE....

[John Zabroski]

I do.  While I can acknowledge change takes time getting used to, they have completely removed my most frequent navigation actions and added a bunch of clicks to get anything useful done.  The only positive to the new UI is it seems to load a lot faster.  But it's not even a Single Page Application - lots of things completely re-load the page.  So I don't understand the point of the re-design.

Here are my top annoyances, in case the UI designers are reading this:

1. It has always been really hard to switch between Confluence and JIRA, and this new design did nothing to address that pain point.

2. Agile Boards are not only an extra click, but extra page load away, and I have to visually search for the tile with my board.  There is also nothing in the UI that says "Board" any more, and so even realizing where to go to get back to my Board, was really hard.  Thankfully, I have a link to my board saved on my Chrome Toolbar, or it would be impossible.

3. Searching is a bit better, but they took away my favorite way to search: Easy access to most recent issues.  Usually I just want to see the last 10 issues I touched. "Filtering by sorting" is a common usability paradigm for users.

Update 9/4/2018: Here is a classical example of what JIRA does wrong now.  They spent time promoting *slow* navigation features, and trying to tell me it's a "fast" way to navigate. What's laughable is they re-invented the Web Browser bookmark, inside JIRA, and made it worse all at the same time.  Why do I need to do an extra click to access stuff important to me? ...And it's still painful to navigate to confluence.

 

[Brandon Phillips]

I hate how they completely disregard the field organization I setup via custom screens and tabs.  I organized the fields for a purpose.  Also a ton of our processes utilize labels.  That field is now buried.  

[John Zabroski]

@Brandon Phillips What kind of work do you do?

[Brandon Phillips]

@John Zabroski I'm a swiss army knife of IT. 

What is relevant here is I lead the effort to bring Jira cloud to a ~1500 person organization.  I work with multiple dev teams on their complex role based work flows.  I work with the operations teams to build out multi-level service desks for support and incident management, I own the change management process which also relies on Jira, and implemented a dozen other business / support processes in different groups across our organization.   Most contain screen customization's particularly using "tabs" to organize the fields in a logical way.  This represents a non-trivial amount of work to document and explain the process.

When these UI changes happen it affects the non-technical end-users.  Leading to a flood of calls, emails, etc.   

If these new changes can respect the custom organization (or improve on it) I'd be fine with it, but to just dump all the fields on the screen in no real order, no respect for white space and scrolling, its ugly and inefficient.  

[Chris Lategan]

+1 For me it's really awful- bad enough that i would consider dumping jira.  

[Deleted user]

Me too!!! I loved Jira before.  Customizing was easy. I could set it up exactly  how I wanted it.  Now, I'm at a new company and I almost ready to give up.  Way too complicated.  You can't even shift+click a story to open the details in a new window - which I used to do ALL THE TIME.  Still haven't figured out how to even enter or see the full details of a story. Absolutely hate it.

[John Zabroski]

@[deleted] I believe, on the agile board, click the card, and then hit the 'e' key on your keyboard. Use 'c' to create new issues.

You can find all the keyboard shortcuts on the bottom left hand pane, right above your avatar, there is a question mark (?) with a circle around it.  Click it and pick Keyboard shortcuts. - I hope this mitigates the awful UI for you.

[Anthony Hall]

Agreed... this has made things so much more difficult. We are wasting so much more time on this than should be required. Forcing a poor UI and UX on us is incredibly poor form, but sadly our opinion doesn't matter.

[Ian Main]

I HATE, HATE, HATE this new UI. It's SO unproductive and easy to get lost in.
I'm an Admin and I've not had one single person say they prefer it.
What the fudge are you guys playing at?
FFS - please listen to your users and revert it back or give us an option to!!!!!!

[Deleted user]

I hate it its really bad, everything takes now twice as much time and some things are so buggy ... its awful. Any recommendations for alternatives? If the intend of this change was to piss people off and make them to leave Jira for good well done good job

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Move over to Server, either hosting it yourself or getting a third party to do it (there's lots of providers).  The new UI won't be coming to that for a long time, if at all (hopefully, never, or if it does, a version that has been fixed)

[Rick Thomson]

Ugly and unusable, well done people who redesigned jira, you've hidden all the functionality and made it very modern...

I've known interfaces designed by coders that were better.

[Milos Nikolic]

I'm just adding my two cents here as well. Initially when the changes were launched I didn't like them. Everything seemed to become harder and navigation was atrocious. As a product manager myself I sympathised and told myself I should give it some time for me to adjust. Well, it's been about 8 months and I still haven't adjusted. The navigational changes just aren't good. There is this strange context switching that occurs in and out of being within a "project" and it doesn't allow you to change easily between them. Trying to get to an advanced jql search screen (which is something I do very often and which I suspect is very common) usually takes about four clicks and page reloads from wherever you happen to be at the time when it used to take about one or two. What surprises me is that I know that Atlassian spend a lot of time on user research and interviewing. I've even taken part in one for the Jira app on mobile. So I don't understand how this design has emerged out of that process. Maybe it's just a minority who don't like it, but so far I haven't come across anyone who has!

[dgbrenner]

Ahh- the option to turn it off come back.  But how long do we have before we are stuck with it?

[John Zabroski]

We're officially stuck with it.  See this post on February 7, 2018: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/introducing-your-new-jira-experience-937886012.html

It does look like they're committing to making it work - they even registered a special domain name to explain their enterprise-wide initiative, here: https://atlassian.design/

They also have a reference implementation called AtlasKit: https://atlaskit.atlassian.com/

(Tongue-in-cheek humor:) For what it's worth, there are some who might see this as pointless complaining, since they never thought JIRA was that great to begin with (hah): https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/11/death-to-jira/

[Chris]

Jira (and other Atlassian products) seem to have the most disorganized help of almost any product I have ever used. It is easier to do a Google search on the topic than trying to find something in Jira help.

The UI seems designed for Unix people who spend all day in the tool. It's useless and confusing for people who only occasionally use it. To be honest, I'm keeping my eye open for something easier to use and will probably change the company over when we get the time to do so.

[Melinda George]

yah we have considered dumping jira b/c of the new UI and changes to how projects are the basis for everything.  our agile team board that brings together jira's from many software "projects"/products is a hot mess and not as good as the project agnostic boards.  atlassian really screwed this up - they had people reverting to old jira for a long time and did nothing to fix it.  everyone i work with +100's of people hates it.  if it were up to me it would be gone...   there has to be a better solution.

[Loud Developer]

`Add Epic` > shows 1 epic, the very first one, has a button `View all Epics`...

Press `View all Epics` > displays an `Add Epic` popup with a dropdown that _only shows the very first Epic_.

So Atlassian is just a support group for special-needs people pretending to do IT and UX, right? Truth hurts.

[Kat Warner]

@Loud Developer - please modify your last sentence as it is not fitting within the community voice and tone guide

[Loud Developer]

You shouldn't promote your company with articles using this tone: https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/atlassian-ditches-brilliant-jerks-in-performance-review-overhaul/news-story/82a5e2abba1939f51d68ae81db8f05bd while releasing software that is of an unprofessional level of quality.

[Miguel Costa]

@Kat Warner  if the software experience was not so bad maybe sentences like that would not be needed...

It's really embarrassing how someone came up with such a solution. but companies pay so I guess you guys are happy collecting all the money

[Kat Warner]

@Loud Developer and @Miguel Costa  - I am not an employee of Atlassian. I am a member of this community like you both are. The voice and tone guidelines are there to help keep this a pleasant space for everyone even when we are expressing our frustrations (and I do express my frustrations here when I feel the need/urge).

Thanks LD for making an edit. 

[Samantha Jones]

Thank God!

I've been a JIRA admin for a while, just joined a different company with the "new JIRA/Zephyr".  

They were exporting csv files to create reports in Excel. How I laughed!! I went about trying to set up a Dashboard to show them how reports should be done.

2 months later..... I'm also creating reports in Excel.

The integration, the navigation...it just doesn't work.  Nothing actually works like it should anymore and everything I knew about JIRA has gone.

[Michael Migliori]

Now that's just sad... It feels a bit like having to go through grief. Our dear old JIRA that brought us so much efficiency is gone. RIP! ^^

[Gary.Samuelson]

My JIRA experience is generally poor.
1) slow and convoluted (deja Lotus Notes annoyances)
2) quirky UI and feedback/response to user commands (likely result of bloated JS code?)

Still better than nursing a MS-Project plan... But, due to JIRA's functional gaps, requires the re-introduction of MS-Project!

Poor end-user experience keeps me looking for alternative solutions. 

Generally

[Russ Mayor]

Sorry, no way to sugar coat this and say that for some people some things are better. This implementation is a total dog's breakfast...all over the place. Functionality has disappeared, new screens are displaying data randomly, for us at least many of the Issue screens just spin their wheels and never open, and it is so sloooow.

Please please listen to all your customers and just admit the cock-up, put it back the way it was, and go back to the drawing board. Just stop trying to convince us that it's getting better.

[Thomas Duez]

"Please please listen to all your customers and just admit the cock-up, put it back the way it was, and go back to the drawing board. Just stop trying to convince us that it's getting better."

Amen, and amen.

[Eiko Pugh]

There are so many critical features (at least for my projects) that disappeared in the recently (maybe in August 2018) released UI. Yesterday I checked job opportunities at Atlassian to stop someone making such changes.

1. Workflow... (wordless,)
    
2. Add "thumbnail" image
   --> easier to grasp the whole content in the description field if image is smaller. 
3. Add table and panel
   --> easier to understand in a diagram
4. Add a link to existing attachments in the description section
   --> saves time to find the right attachment.
   there may be many similar old attachments which are not valid anymore but need to keep for history tracking purpose
5. Show attachments in a list view
   --> saves time to scroll down because important attachments are already linked in the description section.
6. Set a descending order of comments by default
   --> saves time to scroll down to the end to see the latest comment as old comments are less important in general
7. Many others... that I haven't encountered because I am using the old view for now.

[Thomas Duez]

Eiko, you're my hero.

[Usman Sheikh]

Yes, it's awful. 2-3 improvements at the cost of seemingly endless deterioration elsewhere. Old Jira, with the tables from the new Jira would be heaven. 

[Steve Smith]

Atlassian: The New Jira side navigation is...inevitable!  _Snaps fingers, nothing happens._

Users: Yeah? Well I..am..Iron Man

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

[Eric Martin]

We created a next-gen project to help us manage some of the operational tasks... what a mess. I get that it's meant to be "simpler", but this is crippled. The simple ability to "close" as task is removed from this product so "done" tickets hang around for 14 days on my board? Done is done, why can't I get off my board so that the 50 tickets that need attention are not cluttered with another 100 that I don't need to think about anymore?

We will not be moving any other projects to Next-Gen. They should have named it "Trello Pro". Next-Gen implies something that it is not... better.

[Emanuela Ianc]

I really hope Jira UX team is going to sort Jira out, as is at the worst stage it has ever been.

There is one simple task 'create a ticket' and fill in all the fields you need. One is hidden under an icon I don't know what it represents, the other fields are under show more. If you are creating the ticket from a different place you can't see the show more button/link whatever it is.

Why do we need to click on 100 things to do something as simple as that?

Why do you make simple things complicated? 

[Angie Glawe]

Totally agree. Terrible UI update. Nothing is easier to navigate, and the better features are buried and not intuitive to locate or are missing altogether. If the update was meant to cater to mobile UI -- that already was hard to use and not feature rich, so no improvements there. If the effort was to improve the desktop UI -- wow, huge miss. Like huge. I never comment on forums, ever. But this is so bad that I have to comment. You blew this one, big time, Atlassian.

[Dave S_]

The simple solution for me was to create browser shortcuts for the filters I use most often,

and just navigate JIRA using my bookmarks instead of the massive UI failure that they introduced with this bullshit 'project view'.

[Deleted user]

I totally agree. Jira really sucks. It is super hard to navigate between different projects, creating tickets with sub-tickets to be able to assign some story points is a search-and-click nightmare. We tried to put our documentation to confluence. But that sucks so hard as well. Code blocks do not recognize the programming language, you can't put links to headlines to create a proper table of contents. I can't even find a button to create a new document that is not nested inside one of the existing documents. Some wizard I work with was able to create this "first" document, but no one remembers how we got it. Also, Bitbucket is really shit. Sorry guys, but Atlassian really produces unusable crappy software.

[Perkuto Tech]

I've been using it for 2 almost months now... I thought it was just a learning curve, but the UI is just the worst I've ever seen in any app I purchased in recent history. It's so unintuitive to use, too many options - same menu sections use for different tasks. This would probably be a great case study for how not to design an app. 

[Thomas Duez]

REVERT EVERYTHING BACK TO PRIOR TO THE "NEW JIRA EXPERIENCE".

Having shouted that...

What the hell is wrong with you?

1. I click on the spyglass on the left to search.

2. In the slide-out, I type "reporter = firstname.lastname" then [Enter]

Expectation:
I get a list of issues reporter by firstname.lastname

Actual result:
Text ~ "reporter = firstname.lastname"

Notes - if I wanted to query "Text ~", I WOULD HAVE TYPED "Text ~"!

- this is why you need to do an wholesale revert. You have broken and or made worse so much of the Jira experience. You should not have made it "new".

Roll back to before you 100% stopped caring about the work efficiency of users.

This is beyond acceptable.

[Thomas Duez]

And "Community Champion"s all, stay out of this. I'm sick and tired of being told I should convince my org to go spend even more money to build a server to run Jira locally.

Don't. Say. It.

And Atlassian Employees - I only want to hear from you if you're giving me the date the revert is going to happen.

Nothing else is acceptable.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

We only repeat it because people obviously aren't reading it when it's being said before.

[Thomas Duez]

And that was an wholly unnecessary reply. Stop giving any excuse to deflect. You're not a community champion, you're an Atlassian bootlicker.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It was in response to a wholly unnecessary and pointless complaint.  I say it because it's clear that someone else has not read it before.  I know you have seen and understood it perfectly, and it's not aimed at you.  But there's no way for me to ask the software to hide it from those who already know.  

If you want to stop hearing it, un-watch the thread.  If you don't want to do that, your other choice is to ignore it when it's a reply to someone else.

I know it's not ideal, but that's the nature of fora.

As for the bootlicker insult.  Meh.  I'm a fan-boy, yes.  Of a lot of it.  I'm quiet on some of the stuff I really want to criticise them on because me saying it is pointless noise.  But I think bootlicker is a bit strong, especially in this thread, as I mostly agree with what you're complaining about on the Cloud UI.  It's got a few nice ideas trying to get out, but they're utterly swamped by all that's bad.

[Thomas Duez]

"Unnecessary and pointless complaint"? Further evidence you need to relinquish your title.

You don't mean my complaint was unnecessary and pointless - you mean that you've stated over and over that Atlassian will refuse to acknowledge and address BUGS. USABILITY. STUFF THEY BROKE.

Just stop while you're behind.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not quite, although I can see I was not clear.  I was using your words to describe your demand to "stay out of it", not your complaint about the UI.

And, again, I state this "over and over" because people who post "it's broken" in here are not reading or grasping the statement.   Not for the benefit of those who have.

You are misrepresenting my repeats as well.  I have never said Atlassian refuse to acknowledge and address bugs or usability.   I've said that they're not going to go back, or revisit it.  In my opinion, you're right to say they have not acknowledged that the new UI is a failure for most of us.  Which is why I've never said that.

[Thomas Duez]

I appreciate your seeming agreement that "...the new UI is a failure for most of us". I genuinely do.

Atlassian provided the community pages/forum.

While it exists, I will continue to use it to the appropriate end - pointing out bugs, usability issues as well their lip-service that does nothing to actually alleviate the problems.

While they do nothing to directly address (in written word or implementation) these problems, I shall continue to suggest they revert to a time prior to their mistakes.

I have terrible suspicions that they're going to wait-out all this complaining and not really fix much because they, Atlassian, fully intend to continue on this same path.

I believe the majority of the changes they have made have nothing to do with feedback from users, but instead couch supposed response to user feedback in an implementation that is designed to save them bandwidth thereby increasing their profits.

That is why they won't revert. That is why they don't care that their generally captive audience is feeling actual pain that is costing them & their companies actual dollars.

And I am going to continue to complain about it.

And I am going to continue insisting they serve their customers and revert until they actually address these issues.

As you keep relating that there's no point in asking them to revert, I'm going to keep relating they should. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's fair. 

You're still going to have to see me saying "it's unlikely they'll go back on Cloud and the only real-life fix is to move to server" when other people haven't read the conversation, but equally I'll carry on saying that I don't like the new UI either.  

I think you're right that they've gone too far down the wrong path to go back, but that's no reason to stop saying it's the wrong path.

[Thomas Duez]

I am glad that we have come to some measure of agreement. I apologize for my vitriol.

I am still caused by Jira to be mad at Atlassian most of the 5 days of the work-week, so this will not stop...

But I will stop directing it at you!

Thanks, Nic.