Feedback on UI using grays

Our company recently updated Jira on our on premises servers to version 8.20.3. With that (we upgraded from 7.13), we got quite a few changes in the UI and we’d like to provide some feedback on that.

The use of grays for UI features (mainly combo boxes) has confused many of the end users. They used to be white with a dark gray border and now they are medium gray with no border. Many users think these fields are disabled or read only. They don’t know that they can still click them to enter values/makes changes in those fields. We have to tell them to go ahead and click in the field even though it looks disabled because it is actually enabled.

While things still work, the usability is worse than it was before.

We already know the use of gray shades on dropdowns is part of Atlassian’s UI standard used in the Atlassian Design System and across the Atlassian products, but it seems like there could be room for improvement here.

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