How to turn off Epic Color

[Ian Herzing]

Hi there! I cannot figure out how to turn off this "purple square" // Epic Color... I checked my settings and Epic Color is not associated with any screen. How can I remove this?

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Ian - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You can't turn the colors off, but maybe if you change it to Gray for each one that will help. Click on the colored square and then you can change the color. 

[Ian Herzing]

Decent suggestion, thanks John! As long as it can all default to one color that makes sense. Overall wish I could turn it off, I don't need it.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Ian Herzing 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

That block is showing the color associated to the issue. That color may be used to set the color for timeline bars for that issue.

What is your goal in disabling it? Do you simply not want the color block shown on the screen? Or do you not want any color assigned to the issue (which would make bars on timelines hard to see)?

[Ian Herzing]

Thank you for your quick response. As you can see in my board, I have the name of the issue repeating on the card? This seems redundant, and I do not want the color to show either. I simple want the issue summary and that is it.

[Trudy Claspill]

The color block and text on the cards is the display of the "Epic" field. You can turn that off from the View Settings for the board.

[Ian Herzing]

Excellent! Thank you, Trudy. I notice that turning this off, I still see the color block in the ticket.

I really want to remove this color block feature entirely. It could be confusing to users. Is there a way to turn off the color block feature in my board entirely?

[Trudy Claspill]

No, you cannot remove the color block from the Issue details view.

In what way do you anticipate it would cause confusion?

[Ian Herzing]

So imagine you open a card, and it has a grey box. Then you open another card and it has a purple box. Then you open another card and it has a blue box.

As a user, I would ask "What do these colors mean?" - if I don't intend to use a feature, I would like to turn it off. Less features we aren't using turned off = less confusion in general from a usability standpoint.

Hope that makes sense.

[Trudy Claspill]

Do you use the Timeline feature?

The timeline bar colors will match to the color set for the Epic issue.

If you have no concern with the colors of all the bars being the same, setting the color for all Epics to one color is an option. You can even use an Automation Rule to do that for each Epic when it is created.

I did investigate to see if the color could be set to white, clear, or NULL, and none of those are available.

[Ian Herzing]

Hi Trudy, I truly appreciate your efforts on this. You must be a very well respected community member here.

I think the automation idea is great.

Ultimately this feature is just not useful to me. It must be new, because in an older company instance I have of JIRA cloud, in my company-managed Kanban I don't see this feature. 

Not sure why we are forced to choose a color for something. It makes sense from a timeline perspective, but you would imagine those colorings would be separate configurations. 

[Trudy Claspill]

You might want to provide feedback directly to Atlassian on this topic. This is not a perspective I have heard before, so perhaps they also have not heard it.

In Jira you can click on the Help button (near your avatar) and select the Feedback option to send a message directly to Atlassian on the topic.

I did find this Closed/Won't Fix issue that seems to make the same suggestion.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-79659

I also found this open suggestion about adding more color choices. If white was available that might effectively hide the color block.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-92733