Elaine here from Confluence Cloud Product Management. I want to give you a heads up on an upcoming UI update to the page overflow menu in Confluence Cloud.
What is changing and why?
As part of our continuous effort to simplify the user experience, we are making some UI updates to how the page overflow menu is organized in Confluence Cloud. Below screenshot shows where this menu is located.
For apps that use any of the following extension points…
webItems
system.content.action/primary
system.content.action/secondary
system.content.action/modify
system.content.action/marker
webSections
system.content.action
…this update would mean:
Before : apps are located in a Confluence predefined section or app-defined custom section in the menu. After : apps and other integrations will be grouped into their own dedicated section in the menu.
This update is now available on all test instances participating in the Confluence Ecosystem Beta Program. Please check it out and share your feedback with us. Sign up here to get on our Dev First Release Track if you haven’t.
If you currently have app webitem(s) at this extension point, there’s NO change needed from you to place them at the new location in the menu. When this UI update is rolled out, app related menu items will be relocated for you based on the new design.
If you plan to use this extension point in the future, this is a FYI so you know what to expect.
If you have any marketing content or customer support documentations showing this UI, you may want to update them.
By when do I need to do it?
Customer rollout will proceed in a progressive fashion 2020-10-05T07:00:00Z → 2020-10-16T07:00:00Z.
Further questions? Feedback? Please reply below.
Elaine Hankins
PM for everything Confluence Cloud Ecosystem
p.s. I recently moved to this role within the Confluence Cloud Product Management team. I’ll do a proper self intro to y’all soon.
From a usability perspective, how does putting all apps together in the bottom section help if they do different things and might be used with greater or less frequency?
But I appreciate that having lots of apps on the current page overflow menu can create a poor experience too. It’s a shame that customers can’t determine if an app should be treated as a “priority” so it appears in the assigned Confluence predefined section. That way they decide the importance to their users, rather than the app developer or Atlassian.
If I understand your question correctly, Yes, the current web item location does affect the sort order of apps within the section dedicated to Apps.
Our goal in this release is to preserve the same relative order of apps. The difference is that they previously spread across the entire menu and now are grouped into the same section.
@james.dellow, thank you and all great insights you shared. Like you said, this is the first step we made towards a better user experience and definitely not the last.
We’ve been having discussions internally about the two approaches: grouping apps separately from native features vs. grouping features based on job to be done regardless whether they are native or from an app. Both have pros and cons. We’ll continue to iterate on our UX from this perspective for this and other extension points in Confluence Cloud. Look forward to learning more from the community here and from customers.
I’m struggling to see why this is a good idea. What benefit does the customer get by having all app menu items lumped together at the bottom rather than in the appropriate location in the menu.
Why does a customer care if something is a native feature vs an app feature? They’re trying to get something done in their Confluence. Their experience of Confluence is Confluence+all the apps, why would they think “oh this is native confluence, oh that is an app”?
Note that modify is appearing before both primary and secondary.
Should we count on this being the final ordering of extension points, or will there be a future update that aligns with the information you originally posted?
@TimPesce Since we have to move the modify web section to be the first in the drop down list, the modify extension will appear first before the primary and secondary. This is the final ordering and there will be no future update as I am aware of
