Euhm, the new jira navigation? That seems to be a rather significant pending UI change?
watching the video, the following was unclear to me:
-
UI customizations are great. Why is that we need a whole new navigation paradigm, instead of adding the same level of customizations to the existing UI?
If users are complaining that the Global navigation bar is too cluttered, I don’t see how a sidebar with EVERYTHING in it is going to be any different. Sure, that cleans up the global navigation bar to a few items, but now the sidebar is going to be super cluttered. Same end-result in my mind.
Allowing users to customize the current global navigation bar and project sidebar would accomplish pretty much the same. -
what’s the reason for Service Desk projects to not adopt the tab navigation?
This creates inconsistency, and seems to defeat the purpose of a unified navigation scheme. -
In the video, it appears that apps would not automatically show as tabs in the project navigation, and that users would have to enable them specifically. Is this correct?
-
Apps with nested navigation get a dropdown when in a project, thus a user can navigate within the app by using the dropdown. From what I saw in the video, apps with a Global screen don’t get the same. Thus, a user would have to return to the sidebar in order to change screens. This contradicts the whole “users can collapse the sidebar for more space”, since a user would have to constantly reopen the sidebar in order to navigate anywhere else in the app
-
how can you tell us with a straight face that any of this is going to give apps enough room on the screen? Sure, the sidebar is collapsible. But that’s true today, and I can tell you from personal experience that most users I’ve encountered don’t collapse the project sidebar. So, as a vendor I am now losing space on the left, and I am losing space at the top in a project, since you’re forcing these tabs on me, which is taking up screen real estate I used to have.
-
are changes to the sidebar or project tabs on a per-user basis? Or does one user hiding something affect all other users?
2 Likes
I or someone else representing Adaptavist would be interested in participating in an interview
2 Likes
I’m interested in participating in the interviews as well.
1 Like
Hi there!
I am basically still trying to get back into my groove after Team and jetlag and I’ve only just installed the Chrome app and watched the video. First impressions:
- I agree that user customization options are good and needed. I can tell you that at least I don’t regularly use half of what’s currently offered in my Jira top nav and I would appreciate being able to hide it and replace it with stuff I use more often (such as single apps, single boards) in addition to the current items I use regularly (projects, recent, apps menu)
- I will agree with some of the people before me and say that I don’t need nor want a major redesign of the navigation. I was a big proponent of the change to introduce the top nav in the first place, so it’s not that I just don’t like change.
- The old side nav took up way too much space and I don’t see how the new side nav would make this any better. Of course users can minimize it, but I think I remember doing this too often to get decent use out of my screen real estate is surprisingly tedious, so I ended up not doing it much and constantly being annoyed.
- I feel like the side bar nav could become quite unwieldy for users who are involved in many projects if all the other projects are always visible when navigating projects.
- When navigating JSM queues right now with the sidenav width how it was before I started adjusting it, just the indentation alone left only 1/3 of the sidenav width for the actual queue name. See point 3.
- I understand that putting the search top, front and center is to encourage people using AI as was mentioned in the video. I know this might be an unpopular opinion with the leadership and probably won’t make a difference, but the last times I tried using AI search, it did not work very well. Now I know that this hype train has left the station and we’re trying to get Wall Street onboard. I also know the feature today is the worst it is ever going to be going forward. So I can see why we’re focusing on this part. But even if the AI search were to become very good, I just don’t see myself in my daily workflow using it so much that giving it so much screen real estate would be justified for me.
- I think the create button being so close to the search bar looks like the two things should be related, but they aren’t, so I don’t think it makes much sense there.
- It’s not entirely clear to me if apps’ project pages will be hidden by default in the inner project tab nav. If you’re doing it like the weekday-themed competitor that this design seems to take large inspiration from, they would be hidden by default. And even if you do add them, they would very likely be behind the fold in the overflow menu. Apps have a hard enough time being discovered by end users as it is and this change will exacerbate this issue. I could see this issue being iteratively solved instead as well.
Long story short, I think you’re trying to go back to a site layout paradigm that Atlassian moved away from for a good reason or five. Please rethink this. Instead consider iterating on the current design.
I will continue to use the browser plugin and will leave feedback using that going forward 
Thank you for making this available at this stage.
If you want me for the interviews, I’d be happy to participate in it, but I could also understand if you’re not interested in that based on this post.
Cheers and have a great weekend,
Tobi
5 Likes
Hi there!
Thanks for sharing all these changes, I’m sure It has taken so much effort. The Chrome extension is so helpful to make us try it.
I have some concerns and questions:
- In the video, you have shown that a specific app could be placed as default in the project navigation. What about the same behavior for the sidebar navigation? I’m sure many users would like to have available in one click an app that use it every day.
- I agree with @arajah that it would be really useful for vendors to know the status of the sidebar.
- One question from the video: It has been mentioned that the project administrator can change the project navigation and that will affect everyone in the project. Does this mean that it is the default one, but then users can modify it? If not, I don’t see it useful, because maybe the project administrator considers 4 specific tabs necessary, while a developer has never used 3 of them and at the same time misses another 2 tabs for his daily work.
Me and the rest of Deiser product team is available for an interview.
Cheers
1 Like
Apps menu should give an option to display custom app items.
Apps
-App 1
-App 2
*Custom app navigation item 1
*Custom app navigation item 2
*Custom app navigation item 3
or after selecting an app drill down to app menu:
-Go back
-App 2
*Custom app navigation item 1
*Custom app navigation item 2
*Custom app navigation item 3
All apps with a left side menu will suffer without this.
Cheers
Prem
1 Like
@arajah - where have you been? It looks like the last 12 days went by without any “discussion” from you. Is the RFC supposed to be us vendors discussing this? Or is there a particular reason for the lack of responses from Atlassian?
Hi @ademoss and All,
Thanks for your feedback following the video. We are working on consolidating them this week prior to organising the interviews \ next steps. There is a ton of good feedback coming through, so working internally to triage before we can respond to them meaningfully.
Thanks for your patience.
Hey @arajah ,
Our Forge app has a sidebar for navigation on the left side, which is expandable multiple times (3x) and contains more than just text. On the right side, we also already use a tab bar for sub-navigation:
Will there be opportunities for Forge developers to add their own expandable content to the new Navigation sidebar? What are your recommendations for apps that already have a sidebar on the left side? Will this type of sidebar be possible with the new sidebar concept?
1 Like
Hi Anthony
Thanks for sharing the comprehensive feedback.
-
The move from top to side navigation is driven by the need for Atlassian products to have a refresh and a consistent nav look and feel. As we are refreshing the nav, we are tapping on the opportunity to adopt Industry standard for side nav so we can arrive at a modern , scalable navigation that is inline with competitor apps and widely used industry app patterns (like Gmail, Slack etc).
To clarify, we are not moving to side navigation in order to enable customisation features. Its the other way around, where we are enabling customisation given that we now have the sidebar. The changes we are proposing are fundamental for the future scaling needs of the products - not all of the upcoming changes are visible today, but they would be iterative.
Also, our plan is to have the top navigation consistently host menu items\ features that are global across all Atlassian products (Ex: Search, Create, User profile, Settings etc). -
Good question. While we are driving consistent patterns for the top and global sidebar components (like Recents, Starred etc), we acknowledge and accomodate product specific menu to suit the product’s context and needs. In JSM, there is a need to view the list of Queues and Issues while users do deep work in specific items. The vertical sidebar navigation allows for this.
-
All apps will be displayed by default . Project admins can choose to hide\show the app tabs via customisation. The specific case demonstrated in the video is for when all apps are already hidden - this is NOT the default.
4, 5 We are revisiting the. Collapse\Expand of sidebar for a full focus mode . Design explorations are in progress, thanks for sharing this feedback. We could share early thoughts during the interviews .
- Customisation of side bar is per user. Changes done by one user will not reflect for others.
Hi Yve
Thanks for sharing the feedback.
-
Dashboards are not gone. They are available and visible via the sidebar, however the user can choose to hide the menu item via customisation.
Also, if you prefer to set the Dashboards as the Home page, you could do this via Settings-> Jira Personal Settings->Your Jira Homepage dropdown.
-
We will monitor for additional feedback around the perception of insufficient spacing in the sidebar.
Could you clarify what you mean by Starred, Recents looking like list items? -
“View all projects” have a couple of entry points
-View all projects in the sidebar
- Top navigation Search → Projects
Could you pls clarify on why you feel the sidebar entry point is counterintuitive?
- We have no plans currently to unify Jira and Confluence into a single product\ UI.
Hi Tobi
Thanks for sharing the feedback.
- Great to hear that you find the customisation to be useful.
- We acknowledge that this could be a big change. We have shared the reasons behind why we want to move to the sidebar. Please review them and let us know if there are concerns that haven’t yet been flagged by others.
- We hear you! . We are exploring designs for a Full focus mode to hide the sidebar completely. Still early with our thinking, we could share them for additional feedback during the interviews (to be scheduled).
- This is a recurring theme, thanks for sharing. We will explore further customisation options to hide projects that are not needed by users.
- The Chrome extension had a wider sidebar, we have since then tightened it to a default width of 320px. We will continue to monitor the sentiment from JSM users on this.
- Improving the Search AI capability is out of scope for the navigation changes, but I understand that the Search AI team is working on making the feature more powerful. I will share your feedback with them.
- This is an interesting and good callout. We have made a note to monitor signals on this from more users.
- Apps will be displayed by default. Project admins can choose to hide\show and\or re-order them. The proposed solution should not impact the discoverability of the apps, Pls raise any additional thoughts that we might be missing here.
Thanks for continuing to trial the Chrome extension. We are yet to organise the interviews, will reach out to you when we begin scheduling them.
So… you’re still not explaining why Service Desk gets a free pass here.
First you’re laying out reasoning for all these changes around industry standards, and consistency, and whatnot. Yet, here is one app that magically gets a special provision carved out.
So far, the whole “we acknowledge and accomodate product specific menu” sounds like an excuse so the Service Desk team doesn’t have to jump through the same hoops and redesign their app fundamentally.
Yet, every vendor with sidebar navigation has to go through that pain. I don’t even know where to begin to express how messed up that is. It defeats your entire point of claiming consistency. It’s also yet another example of Atlassian not dog-fooding their own decisions.
Service Desk should serve as a beacon and trail blazer here, and the team behind it should show us how to best redesign an app that has sidebar navigation to accommodate these changes, so we vendors have some real-world examples that Atlassian can stand behind.
1 Like
Hi Laura
Thanks for the feedback.
- Setting default app in Project sidebar navigation is a feature that has not been requested before. We will continue to monitor for more requests to help with prioritisation.
- To your question on the video - Project admins can set the tabs \ re-order for their users. Users cannot further customise this setting today. Its interesting to hear that Project admins could show more apps than actually needed by developers or in some cases hide apps that they need. Is this common?
Thanks for your interest for the interview. I will engage you when we begin to schedule.
Server collapse design to show visible icons after you collapse the menu, was much better - gmail style.
Please revert this functionality on the cloud.
Additionally Side navigation - Side navigation - Components - Atlassian Design System should get a new property to be able to be placed on left or right side of the screen. Collapse element should be then visualised on the left or right side.
That way developers could display a menu on the right side.
2 Likes
@arajah We from seibert media / Agile Hive Cloud are interested in participating in the interviews as well. The new navigation would play a important role in the way the users are able to navigation within our product.
1 Like
By differentiating the “global Atlassian menu items” from “Jira-/Confluence-specific menu items”, you cut out the opportunity to make a different sort of hierarchy distinction. One of the benefits of the current Cloud navigation is differentiating:
- “global Jira menu items” (e.g. Dashboards, Filters) from “project-specific menu items” (e.g. Components, boards).
- "global Coo
From my experience:
- Helping users to orient themselves within the Jira project is valuable.
- Helping users easily feel which Atlassian tool they’re in, and switch between them, is valuable.
It sounds like Atlassian is trying to unify the experience to make their products (eg. Jira, Confluence, JSM) feel like parts of the same “Atlassian” product. (I don’t expect these products to actually merge, just feel merged if you have both.)
Making them work together is valuable for users. Using a consistent UI and navigation language is valuable for users. Adding customisation options for a tidier navigation based on a user’s needs is valuable.
However, I think the fact that Jira, JSM, Confluence are different products, with different uses and purposes, is not a problem for users. Understanding and feeling the difference is actually really useful. (I’ve had to provide support for customers when they don’t understand the difference.)
Switching navigation will cost energy for users. I’m not understanding what benefit will be great enough for that to be worthwhile.
Hi everyone,
Thank you for providing your feedback on the proposed navigation changes via the RFC and interviews. We have consolidated enough feedback through the RFC, and I am now formally closing this phase.
I’ve outlined the next steps below:
- Interviews and additional feedback:
- If you’re interested in discussing the topic further or have specific questions on how your apps can adopt the new navigation, please schedule some time using this Calendly link.
- Interview overview:
- We will ask targeted questions to gather insights on specific design elements of the new navigation. Topics include ,but not limited to:
- Expand/collapse mode for the top navigation and sidebar
- The customization of the navigation
- The usefulness of the starred/recent feature for apps
- We will ask targeted questions to gather insights on specific design elements of the new navigation. Topics include ,but not limited to:
- Please install the Chrome extension before the interview to discuss specific experiences with your apps.
- Ongoing feedback collection:
- We will continue to conduct interviews until the end of June 2024.
- Post-interviews, we will triage and consolidate all feedback on our end.
- Design and timeline updates:
- We’re actively working on the designs and will share the final outcomes in Product Team Talk Times (PTTT) . Please look out for upcoming ACE(Atlassian Community Events Atlassian Developers) event on this topic.
- During the PTTT session, we’ll also provide details on timelines for adoption.
- Early access to new navigation:
- We want to enable the new navigation for you to explore as soon as possible. So please email the details of your test instances to arajah@atlassian.com .
- We’ll keep you informed through change communications via community posts and other channels to ensure a smooth adoption of the new navigation.
Thank you for your continued support and valuable feedback.
Best regards,
Arsi Rajah
Senior Product Manager
arajah@atlassian.com
Calendly link
Can you please make sure that these changes are rolled out through the regular Developer Canary / EAP process instead? Not only will this message not be seen by all developers, the process of having all of them reach out to you individually seems cumbersome. There have been plenty of initiatives around developer access, please use them
9 Likes