New issue view "honest" feedback from "real" customer

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Hello Atlassian and Vendors,

We are an author of Issue Checklist app, and like most of you, we struggle with the New Issue View design.

Our app displays panel with checklist items on the right side of the issue (which turned into Glance in New Issue View). We also allow moving the Checklist panel to the left side below Description (this part became Content in New Issue View).

Today, we received candid feedback from one of the customers. They list few pain points related to New Issue View, and overall they seem to be very frustrated.

The biggest issue is that they would like to see a long list of comments and checklist panel/items at the same time without additional clicks or scrolling. It is not possible in New Issue View.

Below is the customer feedback.

I wonder if Atlassian is aware of the limitations the New Issue View brought. I also wonder if other vendors have a similar experience.

Dear Support,

I already wrote a Review and you offered the opportunity to write to you.
I am not really happy with this solution to move the checklist to the left. Both options are a bad solution for us, as we use checklist massively. We have a lot of entries and this causes on both solutions problems:
a) new layout:
its hidden and you need to click to open it and then you don’t see all, you have to scroll or the are not shown at all.
b) left side:
due to the amount of entries the comments are way down below and we need to scroll all time to take a look on the issue, then scroll down to write the comment, scroll back to take a look
 and so on.

This is not what “improvement” should be!
But in this case, it’s not your fault, due to the “idiotic” changes of Atlassian. The new layout is hiddious and totally step backwards. For most actions, you need always one or two clicks more than before.

Is there now way for you as “honored winner” to get Atlassian rid of this fucking layout?
Cant your widget just stay on the right side as it is? What the hell is wrong with it and why has it to be hidden behind a button???

Please note that in point a) customer refers to the bugs that were solved by Atlassian I think (no scrollbar in Glance and no content in Glance).

Cheers,
Jack

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It seems to me that the issue glance is perfect for your use case. It gives you the full height of the issue to display your checklist, without other apps or issue information bothering you. Why did you choose to move the layout to the content side of the issue?

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Why did you choose to move the layout to the content side of the issue

We did not. Our default location is still Glance. We just allow users to move left in case they need a wider panel.

The problem reported by a customer about Glance is that they would like to see the Checklist panel all the time as they use checklist massively. So they are irritated by the fact that why has it to be hidden behind a button.

Also, the Glance requires scrolling more often than old issue view: then you don’t see all, you have to scroll.

The former problems with Glance (missing scrollbar issue, etc.) did not help too.

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@jack, this is something I mentioned in another post. They have taken into account the users (and content) that people don’t want to see all of the time and completely ignored the fact that some people do want to see this information all the time (that is why they paid for it). I suggested being able to pin a view open which would keep both parties happy (if done right). This doesn’t have to be plugin developer choice it can be a customer choice.

I have a plugin where you can define project custom fields and display them in an issue. Now it is collapsed down to one field, how do you abbreviate a bunch of custom fields to a single line. If the customer thinks this information is important and should be viewed then their users have to continually click to open and view each time they enter an issue.

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Hi @paul,

indeed your case sounds similar.

The solution could be different though. In your case, the left (Content) panel would solve the problem if pinned and open all the time. In the case reported by our customer that would not solve the problem as it interferes with Comments.
However, the old issue view solves both cases, yours and ours :slight_smile:

Can you link the other post you mentioned? Maybe I can add my comment there and like it to improve its visibility.

Thanks,
Jack

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@jack, It was: Rolling out support for apps in the new Jira Cloud issue view - #12 by paul

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Hey @jack, thanks for the feedback here and being completely honest with us about how the changes are affecting your customers. We want to do the best job we can and sharing this kind of feedback is extremely valuable for us to do so.

Based on your feedback it seems there are two key problems your customers are facing:

The problem reported by a customer about Glance is that they would like to see the Checklist panel all the time as they use checklist massively . So they are irritated by the fact that why has it to be hidden behind a button .

Also, the Glance requires scrolling more often than old issue view: then you don’t see all, you have to scroll .

and

The biggest issue is that they would like to see a long list of comments and checklist panel/items at the same time without additional clicks or scrolling. It is not possible in New Issue View.

I want to address both of these.

First: The glance model itself, clicking into more information instead of showing iFrames up front.

We have made a conscience trade-off with the new design to allow for the issue view to scale out for users to use many other tools. We have tens of thousands of pieces of feedback, customer research, interviews, and countless UX testing that identified a key problem around the old issue view. And that was the fact that customers would install marketplace apps and quickly get overwhelmed by all of the empty iFrames or even populated iFrames that were always shown up front, on every issue, all the time. This made the issue experience extremely overwhelming and confusing to use for many users. Even within a team, one person would dictate the experience for everyone, even though they may work differently and be focused on different pieces of information.

I would be very curious to know more about this customer and if checklist is the only tool they use and does everyone on the team work the same way on the issue (e.g. wanting checklist to always be visible over all other fields right up front). Also, if this person was working that way and always wanted it visible, sounds like this is being used as primary content for the issue, and could be moved to the left-hand side where things like subtasks and linked issues appear, which you support.

We settled on the glance pattern, which gives users a high-level view of “how many checklist items are not done yet” and the ability to click in and focus on those tasks while scrolling and looking at comments at the same time (left hand side) as an example.

Second: Scrollability

I am quite confused by your statement that the old issue view, you could see more? If anything you would see less on the old issue view, because marketplace apps were always placed below certain system fields, so your checklist would likely load in the middle of the page. If there are a lot of checklist items, you will naturally have to scroll.

In the new issue view, you are placed in the entire right column, giving you as much height as possible. So while a user does have to click in, they would have more room to scroll.

Lastly, you mention they can ‘see a long list of comments and checklist panel/items at the same time without additional clicks or scrolling’. In the old issue view, you cannot scroll separately to see the comments and the checklist side by side. This is possible in the new view. Do you know what they are referring to?

Looking to the future

I am curious to know if this is an overwhelming theme in the feedback you are hearing from customers. Is this still a small number or a majority? Is it growing in volume? This would help give us more context when improving this in the future.

The new ecosystem patterns are a big step in the right direction, we are already getting a lot of positive feedback about this. But, we are also hearing some negative feedback and there are certainly areas we want to improve given how new this is still.

We will not be providing the ability to always show an iFrame up front on the right-hand context side like your customer is asking. However, we will be looking into ways to better accommodate this use case like the pinned idea you mentioned, or being smarter about automatically showing the issue glance details (your checklist iframe) as that user navigates around to other issues. Theoretically, they would only need to click on it once to open it up for that “session” of viewing many issues.

Let me know if you have any follow up questions, thoughts, or other feedback. We are keeping track of everything in this forum and it feeds into our decision making.

Cheers!

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Hey @paul

Based on your coment

What is the marketplace app that this is for. I would love to take a look. If you are defining custom fields via JiraIssueFields module, they should show up as fields, not all collapsed? Unless you are doing within an iFrame using Issue Glance module? Just trying to gain some more insight about your use case.

Note: We have a seperate problem about custom fields defined by App Vendors not appearing in the new issue view. We are aware and working on a solution.

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@tpechacek It’s called Custom Fields but it doesn’t use JiraIssueFields just a panel on the right hand section of the issue.

Also I have been private messaging you for about a month over a problem you said to send you the details for. Can you please check your messages.

Thanks
Paul

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@paul Just responded!

Ok, so for the panel yeah that would not be visible up front but behind a glance. Just took a look at that app. Couple of follow up questions

  • Do customers usually group the custom fields together into multiple panels or? Like 'Customer Contact" with 5 fields then 'Related Articles" with 3 fields, etc. Or is it just a list of custom fields, which are any order / type with some basic grouping perhaps?

The reason I ask is that we are going to be following a similar pattern for supporting “tabs” that can be added to the Screen Config. That way you can group fields into a different set and it will appear as a glance that opens up into more fields. We have tested this a bit and performs well but we will iterate as we start to roll that out in the future, it’s still early days for that feature.

Otherwise, if you are adding a lot of fields of different distinct types, you should look at using the JiraIssueFields module for proper fields support. Is there a reason why you do not use that today?

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@tpechacek

There is no facility to group fields, just the order the appear. The user just defines particular fields and the plugin displays them in the issue. I haven’t looked to see if there are any patterns to what the users create or if they could be grouped.

I’m not sure how you would group fields in a glance since the plugin just has one glance to display everything, maybe I’m missing something.

I don’t understand how I would use the JiraIssueFields module. That module (as far as I understand it) requires you to define each field in the atlassian-connect.json field. My plugin allows you to create fields dynamically, as many or few as you want. The JiraIssueFields module is fine for distinct fields but not dynamic.

Thanks
Paul

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@paul

I’m not sure how you would group fields in a glance since the plugin just has one glance to display everything, maybe I’m missing something.

So we have the glance summary (always visible on the right-hand column of new issue view) and glance detail (the iFrame that gets loaded after a user clicks into that glance). The glance summary would be something like “Company Details”. When you click in it would show any number of custom fields because that’s the iFrame.

We are working on allowing you to dynamically set the glance icon + name + status.

Alternatively, you could look at showing all these fields on the left-hand side using the Issue Content module. See Can vendors hide and the web panel opened by a quick-add button? - #13 by nnmatveev which describes what we are working on next. It will allow you to define an entity property tied to the issue Content module and you can control when to display the iFrame below (best practice is when there is content and we highly highly recommend this pattern)

As for the dynamic fields thing, I see what you mean
Let me ask around and get some more context on this.

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The user defines the field names and types, there could be one there could be twenty. But how do you summarise a group of fields that you have no knowledge of. It’s just a list of random text (possibly in a foreign language) that I have no context on.

The feature in the linked article sounds good. We could run some code to create the entity properties for anyone who want the fields displayed in issues. I would need to change the panel to stack them across the screen (which wouldn’t look that great) otherwise they would take up too much room. The reason they were placed on the right was because they took up minimal room for a vertical layout

Thanks
Paul

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Hello @tpechacek,

Thank you for the answer. I understand the rationale behind New Issue View.
The point of my post was to let you know that there are users who prefer the previous design, and they have valid reasons for that.

I asked a customer to chime in and clarify the way they use Issue Checklist so we can get a wider picture. Let’s see if we can the answers.

BTW. I don’t remember the registration process in this portal. Can the customer access it?

I will try to answer some of your question/concerns according to my knowledge.

wanting checklist to always be visible over all other fields right up front

I guess the Checklist is not the only part of Issue View they need. That might be the reason why they don’t like Glance (despite the additional click required).

sounds like this is being used as primary content for the issue, and could be moved to the left-hand side where things like subtasks and linked issues appear, which you support.

I tried to cover that earlier. From what I understand, they work massively with both Comments and Checklist. Moving Checklist panel to the left (beneath Description and Subtasks), moves the Comments section down, so it is even harder to work simultaneously with both Checklist and Comments.

I am quite confused by your statement that the old issue view, you could see more

I was not precise so let me rephrase that: The old issue view was good enough (decent) to show both Comments and iFrame at the same time without a need for an additional click. Please see the screenshot taken on my 15’’ Mac (the browser window height = (full screen - doc height); width = 2/3 of the screen)

checklist%20and%20comments
checklist%20and%20comments2644×1796 482 KB

I’m not sure if old issue view in old experience wasn’t even better.

Lastly, you mention they can ‘see a long list of comments and checklist panel/items at the same time without additional clicks or scrolling’. (
) Do you know what they are referring to?

  1. They refer to the additional mouse move and click required by Glance. Even if Glance saves scrolling in some cases, we need to remember that:
  • Mouse move and click is required every time they want to work with Checklist in Glance. Pre-Glance design required scrolling under some circumstances only (please see the screenshot above)
  • Occasional scrolling seems cheaper/easier to me than often mouse move and click to open Glance

When multiplied by the amount of work performed daily, I think I can understand customer frustration.
These are very subtle and difficult to spot differences, but UX is tricky as we all know.

  1. On the other hand, they might refer to scrolling required if Checklist is located on the left side:
  • It requires a lot of scrolling if they work with both Checklist and Comments
  • It usually requires more scrolling than old issue right panel because Checklist is positioned higher on the right side (old issue view) than if positioned on the left side (see screenshot above).

I am curious to know if this is an overwhelming theme in the feedback you are hearing from customers. Is this still a small number or a majority? Is it growing in volume?

It is the only report we got but please don’t disregard it because of that. Issue Checklist is much smaller than anything that you worked with at Atlassian. From my experience, the single report can suggest there are tens of other customers sharing the same problem which means thousands of users in total.

I hope it helps. Let’s see if the customer can give us some more details.

Cheers,
Jack

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Hi,
we use Checklist a lot and its a global part of our usage of Jira.
And the new layout, as @jack mentioned, is a step backwards at all.

First, you need a additional click anyway to open this “glance” thingy.
And this is annoying as we need always one click to read, add issues or comment on that.

Also the chance is high you “miss” points from checklist as not every ticket has some, but mostly 80% of our tickets have issues. If they are hidden, they may be not seen or noticed.

Also we turned around comments, so newest one is on top. So a user writes a comment and refer to the issue checklist (for example if he added a new point, or cannot check one due missing infos).

Our checklist can also be very long, around 8-10 Entries in average, but can go also up to 20-30 entries.

Packing this very useful app in a hidden area where to open need a additional click, is very uncomfortable for us.
Why not let Users decide if they want to hide or stick a app on the right panel. Make it configurable somewhere. This would solve at least this problem.

@tpechacek
We use Issue Checklist company-wide, as they are part of our workflow.
So this effects our whole workflow and will cause further problems when the new design will be rolled out.

Btw: new design.
Improvement to me means NOT to REDUCE everything in one button, where you need more clicks to get same result as before.
For example: in the 2017 design you just clicked the button upon right “new project”, and there you go.
Now you have to go to dashboard, click on projects, then further on “create project” and i get a new screen to enter all infos.
Notice that on the old design this was all done by one Overlay and one click!
And your new design is the same progress again, a lot of clicks more - for same result.

Improvement = get rid of this f****** “mobile first” idea.
Jira should be a business solution, means no one really works on mobiles with a ticket system.
We need functions easy to reach and FAST - as time always matters.

Kind regards,
Markus

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When comes to the “more clicks” complain, I must admit that I suffer from it too because jumping from Issue View to Jira administration (e.g. Add-ons) was simpler from the top-right dropdown in Old Experience versus top-left Jira icon/home in New Experience.

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To answer this question, yes the customer can access this thread without registering as it is public. However if they want to respond they can easily create a user with an Atlassian ID.

1 Like