Easier status updates for work items

[#1]

Hi Jira Community,

We’re thrilled to announce a small but important change to how you update the status of a work item in Jira. The Status field will now appear directly under the work item’s Summary, making it easier and faster to find and update the status of your work.

What’s changing?

• Previous location: The status field was grouped with other actions, which sometimes made it tricky to find.

• New location: The status field is now below the summary field, right next to the Add button.
  

Why are we making this change?

Many users told us that finding and updating a work item’s status was confusing. Moving the status field to a more visible spot simplifies your workflow and makes Jira feel more intuitive. Based on our research and past experiments, making the status easier to find led to more updates and smoother onboarding.

What about the Resolution field?

The Resolution field in CMP remains unchanged for now. It will continue to appear only on Done work items.

What do you need to do?

Nothing! This change will be applied automatically.

If you work across multiple project types, you may notice the status field in different places as we rollout—this is expected. We are rolling out to team-managed projects first, then company-managed projects. We will commence rolling out mid August. 

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hi @Ahmud Auleear ,

Interesting decision 👀

Can you maybe share some additional details related to the rollout? Are changes planned to be rolled out in phases, based on product/app plans or will it be rolled out for all customers during August?

Cheers,
Tobi

[Dave Mathijs]

👀 Another quite significant UI change that Jira admins en product owners will need to "explain" to their users.

The current location is quite "in your face" and enforces the importance of the process stage.

With the new location, it's more integrated next to the other - unrelated - buttons, although the location seems more logical.

Don't know what to think of it yet.

⚠️ Communication is key for these kind of changes.

@Ahmud Auleear Does CMP refer to 'Company-Managed Project'? If yes, rather use this than the acronym that other users (i.e. non Jira admins) might not be accustomed to.

[DL_PGF]

I would like to know who is this focus group is that you consulted. There is a bright blue button in your screenshot - it's the first thing I see on the screen. Moving it won't make much of a difference. The better value is to prevent the status dropdown from disappearing when scrolling down - similar to how the watch/vote option icon stays on top when you scroll.

[Dirk Lachowski]

There isn’t anthing about the current location that makes it “tricky to find”. If you’re new to a tool, everything needs to be learned. If you are used to it, muscle memory kicks in.

Atlassian, just stop pushing stuff around. You are helping nobody and keep makeing the life of everybody worse. There’s thousands of open issues if you want to do some work. Cosmetical and totally unneded - and unsked for - changes like this one only add to the ever growing question if it‘s time to change tools. If I want Asana, I’ll use Asana. I do not need Jira to become a bad Asana clone. Just hire more engineers and less of the people who are proposing changes but never really use your tools.

[James Rickards _SN_]

It seems change fatigue is starting to set in and cause frustration.

Please give it a couple of months to let people get used to the new UI, the rename of Project to Space, and Issue to Work.

[Tim Eddelbüttel]

And all "from any status to any status" workflow transitions (that were recently moved into / under the "Automation" button) will stay on the right? 

I can't stop saying it, but please finally implement theming support in Jira and have some kind of "LTS Theme" (long-term-support) for the user interface! Some kind of UI consistency would be highly appreciated and not constantly moving thing across the whole screen.

[YHao]

Could you focus a bit more on the functionality and performance of Jira? It's more important that it works well and is easy to use, rather than just how it looks! Thanks!

[Nikola Perisic]

Hi @Ahmud Auleear 

How many UI changes can we expect in the future? Is there a roadmap that is dedicated to this? Not the cloud roadmap, but the roadmap for UI changes. Some of them are trivial and some of them are huge.

New Jira and Confluence UI change, terminology changes, projects becoming spaces and now we have this one as well. 

I am also curious, how do you do your research for the customer feedback? Which roles do you include?

We as Jira admin/consultants need to prepare our users for these changes. Some of them don't find it important, some of them get really confused. Example is for the boards on the new Jira UI. What is the process where you decide which features are going to be released? 

Recent features felt more like a surprise rather than a relief for the users.

[Dave Meredith]

I actually agree moving all of the buttons for doing things to a work item to one place in general from a usability perspective...

I think that the space underneath the summary is already cluttered with buttons. As an example here's an incident with x7 action buttons before you even add the status switcher button in:

When the buttons are collapsed there are then 7 buttons that don't really convey what they can do with an immediate glance... So this would add to the confusion in an already cluttered UI space:

^^^ This is really not intuitive to me. Also the MAJOR INCIDENT label alignment just kinda triggers me... Please also fix that.

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Resolution makes less sense on it's own without the context of the Status... So having them far apart is confusing right? Workflows often have multiple Statuses for Done depending on the outcome of the process / workflow.

Also where will the Actions / Automation button go? Will it stay on the right hand side? There on it's own? It'd look stupid / out of place / be lonely over there.

---

I echo others comments that the change fatigue to the UI changes is real...

My annoyance is mainly around why wasn't this shipped with the new UI in the first place all at once so that there would be less disruption and confusion to users? This is a few weeks apart from the last big UI change... What would the harm be in just waiting?

But on the other hand users are still getting used to the new UI so is it better to just do it now while they're getting used to the new UI rather than getting used to the UI and then changing it again in 6 months?!

[Dave Meredith]

I'm not a designer but I think I could work with UI as below:
(Be kind... I did this in paint)

[Katie McDaniel]

The pace of change is overwhelming, but for the most part, the UI updates have been positive changes. As someone who frequently trains new users, I can confidently say that this is not one of them. Burying the status change button, and moving it away from assignee, due date, and other necessary "completion" fields makes no sense.

[Madalina Mutihac]

There are way too many changes in a short span of time. For the administrators supporting this ecosystem (especially when supporting it for many clients on many versions of DC and Cloud on a daily basis), it takes so much time to find our way around the ever-changing UI elements. 

This feedback is given with a lot of love because I have been working in the Atlassian ecosystem to 10+ years now. Please consider your long term users when introducing change. Please consider that those users need to train others, write documentation for others, USE those systems on a daily basis.   

[Madalina Mutihac]

From the perspective of Atlassian administrators: how is the user research conducted?

Are new users vs long-term users vs power users vs administrators of different levels all taken into account?

There are so many businesses relying on this for their critical operations. It is unbelievably challenging to help our users / customers when we ourselves can barely keep up with the pace.

[Sarah Lorrain-Smith]

This is quite a frustrating change coming at a time where users are already having to get to grips with other large changes! Please consider delaying it while we familiarise users with the new navigation and change to work item.

[Andrea Robbins]

"Previous location: The status field was grouped with other actions, which sometimes made it tricky to find."

This is not even true. It was grouped with ONE action, the innocent little lightning bolt button next to it. Who said it was tricky to find? The status was in your face?

New location: The status field is now below the summary field, right next to the Add button.

Now it is trickier to find because it is now grouped with many other actions - the add button and the apps button!

Atlassian please THINK about your changes, and stop just doing whatever your non-Jira users tell you. 

This is what should have been thought:

Right now, the buttons under the summary all have a similar function - they provide add on functionality - extending the functionality of the ticket - creating forms, linked work items, subtasks, Confluence pages, etc. The Apps button by definition provides additional functionality.

The buttons on the top right where the status and actions were have the same function - an action (whether it be a status change or triggering an automation rule) needs to be taken on the ticket that is more central to the process the user is to follow.

Ok, so someone said it's too hard to find. Let's say we believe you. The Actions lightning bolt button could have been better represented where the Status was moved to. Now that the Status is alone if the lightning bolt was moved, it is clearer, and to sweeten the deal, we could make its own section and make it bigger. See the image below.

This makes sense because the Actions lightning bolt button FITS the functionality of the other buttons under the summary - it is additional functionality (provided by automation) that isn't necessarily core (you can never use an action on a ticket, but who doesn't use the status?).

If you make the entire word appear you would get more usage out of it too - because the section's function is additional features/functionality, people would go like ohhhh what can I do now to make my work easier with the Actions button (Happy emotions) vs. where is my super duper essential field and why is it grouped with non-essential buttons (furiously looking where the heck it went/mad emotions)?

Stop trying to mimic other tools, please! My job is to get people out of those tools & migrate them to Jira and the #1 thing I hear is they DO NOT actually use the status field. Those platforms are so simple that it's either not done or done. I kid you not, I had to explain them the reason, use case for using a status field and the purpose of a workflow.

This is not the right group to ask where the field they never use should be! The work in Jira is more complex than that and there's not a single soul that doesn't use the status field in Jira. This is what made Jira unique, sophisticated, and the value of the tool, which I feel like is being forgotten. Remember what made Jira great.

[Jim Smith]

This is just another example of another useless change that took development time away from more important concerns.  As has already been stated in other comments, the current huge blue button is more than sufficient, and if it was confusing to the “Many users”, then maybe they should have gone through better training.

[Bogdan Gorka]

What I can contribute to this discussion is a hard-earned observation: preparing training materials for Jira is increasingly becoming a futile effort.
Just last week, I finalized an internal update of our Jira Fundamentals and Jira Administration Basics training decks after the latest UI update — complete with issue screenshots, updated workflows, and detailed guidance. I already know these materials will be partially outdated (again!) in just a few weeks.

Not long ago, Atlassian upheld principles like "don’t f**k the customer" and "open company, no bullshit", with a clear product prioritization logic: #1 reliability, #2 usability, #3 features (RUF). Proof? See here: https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-Product-Discovery-articles/quot-Don-t-fuck-the-customer-quot-what-we-re-changing-after-the/ba-p/1857293

Where are we now?
Is there any long-term product vision guiding Jira’s evolution? Or has the product team been reduced to constantly pushing UI changes and cosmetic updates — just to justify their internal activity (and payroll) and survive the next round of layoffs at Atlassian?

With the change like this one, it feels like usability is deteriorating, not improving — and consistency has been sacrificed for superficial useless changes. Instead of solving real user problems, the focus seems to be on moving UI elements around to create the illusion of progress.

[Thijs Van Baelen]

The status is core to context, why move it away from other context fields?

“Many users told us that finding and updating a work item’s status was confusing.”

Ironically, this change will now make that feedback true...

I wish there was a dislike button for posts like this.

[Martin Runge]

Hi @Ahmud Auleear

I know that people will love it or hate it!
What happens to all the other buttons following the "old" status field position?

Cheers,
Martin

[Mike Carstensen]

I am all about improving things. 
Same changes take time to digest and beauty / functionality is always in the eye of the beholder. 

However.. @Bogdan Gorka is right about the training material, now we can record new Looms weekly. ;) 

If the workflow is a little more complex than "To Do, In Progress, Done", it will also be tough to read the description, right? And where will the automations go? Could you please elaborate who the users are that get asked in advance? And how many users were asked? :)