Why on earth would you think it was a good idea to force the new "experience" on everyone?

[DRFavreau]

Searching this forum even a tiny bit and searching online reveals a plethora of people who are very upset about this change and now you have forced it upon all users dramatically reducing productivity.  Ensuring that your users feel stupid because they can't find simple things they used to do with a single click.  If a user has to Google or submit a question for finding simple things they used to be able to find easily (like uploading a spreadsheet of issues is one that's in this forum, how about switching boards or seeing your own boards?)

You have destroyed any trust power users have with Atlassian by forcing these horrible changes on the community at large.  Offer this "new and improved" experience as a CHOICE as a theme people can choose -- it's as simple as changing a CSS file if you do it right.  Don't force it on people.  Let people use the legacy system that works well and is intuitive and provides 1-click access to the most used features.

This change is absolutely absurd considering the amount of negative feedback you've received about the changes.

[Ryan Kearney]

This is one of the reasons people prefer to use the server installations of Atlassian products. With a server install you are able to manage the version you are on, and develop test/staging environments where new features can undergo UAT so that users feel comfortable with them before upgrading the production environments. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions regarding server installations or migrations from the cloud to server.

[DRFavreau]

I wish we could.  I work for a small law enforcement government agency that does not have the disposable income to justify doing a server install locally.  We simply cannot afford that enormous expense as a small government office.

[Ryan Kearney]

Do you have any IT staff in house? License wise, it is cheaper to host it yourself. There are also managed services offerings which allow you to outsource the hosting for a reasonable fixed fee each year, allowing you to have a cloud based environment with a server product install, controlled by a source that isn't the Atlassian team. 

[DRFavreau]

Yes we do.  We have a large WAN staff and host an enormous amount of data and do colocation for companies.  But none of that is relevant.

We have 15 people who use JIRA, that costs us ~$1,000 a year.  It is much much more expensive for us to have an in-house solution.  I already discussed that with Atlassian.  Not to mention the time it takes to maintain, server upgrades, then the subsequent downtime of those servers, trying to make those servers accessible externally in an incredibly locked down environment.  An in house server is not an option for us.  Nor is hosting it with another company for the small amount we pay for the cloud version.

Nor should this be the focus of my post.  I am a UX specialist and the new "experience" is horrendous.  It is not well thought out.  It does not work for power users.  It is a poor experience wrapped up in lots of white space and fancy shadows.  It's not user friendly. 

That is the point -- not "you shouldn't be in the cloud if you don't like it."