How do I access a compact view?

[Tyler]

EDIT: I added a feature request for this if people want to comment on that instead, for higher visibility. 

I have visual issues and have to use large text on a low resolution monitor.  This results in a lot of wasted screen real estate, and makes it very hard to use the tools as they seem to be specifically geared for very large monitors.

How can I enable some kind of compact view that will reduce the amount of whitespace and condense controls, text, etc. into a denser format?

As an example, clicking on an issue in a search the issue viewport is only about 1/6 of the actual screen real estate, and I can only see a few lines of text or fields at a time due to the wasted white space.

If this isn't possible... why?  Accessibility should be a major focus for any enterprise web app offering, especially from large well established companies?

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi @Tyler,

I understand that you are using Jira Cloud in such a way that your monitor resolution is lower than typical, while the size of text is zoomed in via your browser for the sake of visibility and accessibility.  I can understand why this setup might cause a number of usability problems. I am interested to learn more details about your environment.

What is the resolution of your display?

I ask because our Atlassian Cloud products do have a noted minimum resolution of 1024x768 in order to make sure that all the elements of the page will render as expected.  Also that is with the assumption that the browser view is not zooming in.  Given what you have stated, the monitor resolution might have to increase above that minimum such that the zoomed in text can still render the expected elements on the page.

Also, could you let us know what kind of device you use to access Jira?  Is this a Desktop machine, or do you primarily use a mobile device (like a smartphone or tablet)?

I am curious to know more about your setup.  Perhaps if I can learn more, I can then replicate the behavior here.

Thanks

Andy

[Tyler]

Hi Andy, thanks for picking this up.

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The display resolution is 1920x1080.

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The browser is not zoomed in, but the text size is bumped to large in the systems settings.

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The device is a macbook, attached to a dock with a 25" (?) monitor.  Browser is Chrome.

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Here's a few screen shots from our upcoming migration to a new version.  As you can see, the huge amount of whitespace makes it difficult to get a decent amount of working area if you're trying to do anything even remotely complex.  (eg) I can only see 4 stories on the left, anything more complicated than a short description (eg a code snippet in a comment) will be scrolled both horizontally and vertically and the scrollbars don't line up with the viewport, etc.  I could list a lot more examples of how the excessive whitespace makes the UI extremely high friction if you need them.

It will probably be worse when it goes to PROD as well, as our ops likes to put multiple, undissmissable, uncollapsible banners at the top of our JIRA.

I know lotsa whitespace is the kind of design paradigms these days, but there is a time and a place for compactness too... any design rule pushed to an edge condition generally fails, and this is definitely one of them.  Which, presumably, is why so many web apps offer a condensed or compact view these days (along with Dark Mode, for which I am very thankful)

[Tyler]

FFS... it deleted it when I copied and pasted my wrongly placed answer here.  Ok, abridged version:

Thanks for picking this up, @Andy

Resolution: 1920x1080

Platform: macbook on dock with 25"(?) monitor

Browser: chrome, no zoom tho on some bad days eye strain does require me to do so

There isn't enough room due to whitespace reducing it by 50% or so to display a useful amount of information, such as cards.

Things like the editor have extremely high UX friction for reasons like

• it's impossible to see things like code snippets easily,
• scroll bars are not fixed to the viewport so horizontal scrolling is impossible for long lines except for the last 4 or 5 where the scrollbar is on screen,
• section viewports do not expand with scrolling even tho the main page does, again vastly reducing potentially visual area thru even the most basic mechanism of scrolling the whole page
• areas are not collapsible and minimum sizes for resizing are still large due to whitespace, making bringing a particular area into larger focus impossible 
• controls like select boxes are ludicrously over sized and extremely difficult to scan thru as only 3 or so items can be seen at a time (yes you can search... if every time you can remember or know in advance exactly what the text is for macro is you happen to want out of the couple dozen available)
• there are things like undismissible, uncollapsible, unresizable, hugely white spaced banners across the top of our JIRA instance that further reduce visibility (our ops seems to be addicted to them, there are often two or three)

I have lots more if you like, that's just for the issues view.

Some supporting screenshots:

[Andy Heinzer]

Hey @Tyler Thanks for the response and the screenshots. That resolution is more than sufficient.   I noticed that you are using what we call the 'Issue Navigator' in Jira.  This is what let's you search for issues within Jira.

There are two different modes to view issues in the issue navigator.

1. List View
2. Detail View

Your screenshot shows you're using the Detail View.  While this can be helpful for looking at details of search results quickly, I personally don't prefer this view. 

Instead I think you might benefit from switching to the List view for searching issues.  You can do this by clicking the button immediately to the right of the Export option in the top right of that screen:

This will change what appears on that page immediately.  Instead of Jira trying to show you the entire issue there, you will only see the preliminary search results on that page.

This alone might not solve all the problems I think you're experiencing here.  But it's the first step I suggest trying.  From there, when you click on the hyperlink of a Jira issue it will instead open just the issue (and not all the search results).  I think this can help because it won't have that left panel with search results on that page, and will just show you that issue.

You should notice that the URL format will change when you view issues this way.  The URL will looks something like [yoursite].atlassian.net/browse/ABC-321

But when you're in the Issue navigator (particularly the detail view) the URL of the page will typically have a format of

[yoursite].atlassian.net/issues/

or

[yoursite].atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/SCRUM/issues?jql=

I'd suggest trying that out first.  

I think this might help with the other aspects such as code blocks.  But try that view instead and see if this helps.

Andy

[Tyler]

Thank you Andy.  While I appreciate the suggestions and help, I used this as an example of the problem tho, not the primary problem to be solved.

You do acknowledge that the problem is broader than just the example but having to work around the UI with the similar issues present on most of the site is looking at it the wrong way.  The problem is with the underlying singular design principle that prioritizes whitespace in all formats at the cost of usability across the board.

Hopefully there is a way to get this addressed globally.  Even just altering the CSS to use less whitespace between lines of text would be a start.  Normally I would just do something like that myself, but my workplace has a very tightly locked down environment and so I can't leverage browser add ons to tweak the site myself.

[Tyler]

Ugh.  Please see my top level replies to this comment.  For whatever reason, they do not show up as replies to this comment.

[Emil Hermansson]

Hi, I arrived on this post after searching Google for ways to get a compact view or similar for Jira Cloud. I agree with @Tyler that this cloud interface of Jira is very cumbersome to navigate when it's cluttered with so many buttons and lots of whitespace in between that the space for the actual input field and it's text get's very limited. 

I've worked for many years in the earlier on-prem versions of Jira which offers much better balance between buttons/whitespace and the display of the ticket data one fills in. It would really be a great feature if you could have a more compact or classic view for the Jira cloud as well, as working in Jira Cloud with the new layouts/views makes it much more time consuming. Or potentially just better configurations so that one can adjust the whitespace and button amounts oneself. Thanks

Best,
Emil

[Tyler]

Nice to know I'm not the only one!  
I added a feature request for this if you want to comment on that as well, for higher visibility. 

[Andy Heinzer]

There is an existing feature request to allow users to customize the whitespace that exists between fields in Jira Cloud over in JRACLOUD-76966.   I don't know if or when this might come to the product though, we have a deeper explanation of our Implementation of New Features Policy.

Also that ECO ticket you created wouldn't really apply to Jira Cloud.  That project is specifically for the Atlassian Ecosystem team. They manage our frameworks such as Forge and Connect which allow users and vendors to create their own applications which might integrate with our Cloud products.

[Tyler]

Thank you Andy, that's good to know.  The story you linked to is similar but not quite the same request, FWIW - they're only talking about a single view as opposed to something site-wide.  

I did already read thru the New Features policy, which is why I filed the suggestion in the first place - it looks like the only way I have as an end user to bring attention to it at all.  Given that someone else found my post here the same day using similar search terms and commented saying they had the same issue, I can only hope that it gets enough upvotes to garner some views some day.

As for my suggestion being with the wrong product project, I'm going to have to fault the UX for Atlassian's dashboard at https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10440.  I clicked thru via the "Jira"/"Cloud edition" -> "Suggestions" link, which took me to an issue view page where I clicked "Create" with the expectation it would be for the same type of story as in the issue navigator. 

Going thru it again, it is still an UX fail even knowing this:  I can see that there's a "Project" drop down that is required for the user to (again) select a project... but there is no "Jira Cloud" option.  How is an end user expected to know what the project name is to file a suggestion, when it isn't given in the materials pointing to this tool to do exactly this? 

As well the dropdown, for no obvious reason, restricts the full text of the values to an arbitrary width (it could easily be the width of the viewport) again making it hard just to browse for a project by name - poor UX/UI choice, again. 

One might observe from the view's story IDs that one needs to search for JSWCLOUD, but there is no project that comes up when you enter that into search either.  Nor is there a project coming up for JRACLOUD, which you reference in the linked issue but it obviously not the same as JSWCLOUD which is what the public facing dashboard looks to be pointing at.

I'm happy to do this again in the correct place... but where *is* the correct place to create a story for this suggestion?

[Andy Heinzer]

Not all projects on jira.atlassian.com (JAC) are open to allow all users to create issues in them.  Years ago we allowed that.  For bugs or features to Jira Cloud, the JRACLOUD project would be most appropriate today.  That said, we require such issues in that project have to first be vetted by our support team.   Support can create a new request in that project as they deem fit.

End users don't always have the ability to raise a support case directly though.  Most of the time, it requires that you reach out to your site-admin first.  Site-admins on paid plans can create technical support cases over on https://support.atlassian.com/contact/

However free plan users, or end users of paid plans, trying to access that link will redirect users to post here in Community instead.

[Tyler]

Thanks for the heads up @Andy Heinzer .  I will bring this up with our site admins too then... if I can figure out how to get ahold of them!  LOL