Have your say: What enablement materials would best help your teams adjust to the new navigation?

[#1]

Hi everyone,

We've seen a lot of feedback that more enablement materials would be helpful, and we hear you!

We'd love your input on what types of information would be most beneficial for you and your teams in getting up to speed with the new navigation changes, so we can make sure anything we create is easy for you to use.

Some examples would include:

• A before/after walkthrough of the changes
• A quickstart guide on key actions (e.g. finding your projects - what other key actions would be needed?) 
• A summary of admin controls for the navigation
• Videos describing best practices for customising the new navigation
• An Atlassian University training course (what would you want it to cover?)

As a starting point, we have this guide on key changes to the products, which may help anyone who is immediately looking to get a handle on the upcoming changes.

If you can let us know what content you're looking for, who the target audience for the content is (e.g. will you be sharing it directly with your team, or using it to build your own materials), and what your preferred medium is (video, text documentation etc), that would be wonderful! 

We can't wait to hear from you in the comments below!

Cheers,

The Atlassian Navigation Team

[James Arthur]

Atlassian Navigation Team,

As an Admin with 1000 users, our target audience is the daily user (95%) who is performing tasks and updating projects/issue cards. We are Jira Premium user. We have many power users whom I have asked to test the new navigation within the sandbox. So far, most feedback has been neutral to positive. The main question I am asked is, why make a change of simply swapping the left-hand side for the top? As an admin, I understand the unification of products. However, the daily user does not identify nor understand the need of "moving their cheese." Hence a short, very short explanation of why the change will help.  

I think our needs for training materials for the navigation change: 

1) Very short video (5 mins max) or prior vs. new updates and how the average users can adapt to the change quickly.

 2) A quick start guide/s on key actions (e.g. finding your projects - what other key actions would be needed?)

3) A summary of admin controls for the navigation

4) Videos/materials describing best practices for customizing the new navigation.

I find it to be somewhat intuitive and I simply need to re-learn where items I use most are now placed on the screen. 

Thanks,

Jim 

[Kaitlin Madsen]

Without having the new navigation myself, it's hard to say exactly. But I think before/after visuals are necessary. The linked article has some before and afters, but they seem very stale. Having some real examples would help people connect the dots more. And we have a large number of boards that we work out of more than individual projects, so how to find boards, favorite them, etc. would be helpful. 

As an admin, I would appreciate admin specific documentation as well. 

My organization will probably view text over videos. If it's videos - make them very bite sized and specific to a function. They won't watch a video that's 5 minutes that they have to click through the find what they are looking for. 

If possible, I would like to just use the documentation you provide instead of having to make my own. But that all depends on the content provided.

[Morgan Watts]

Hello, thanks for starting this thread to collect ideas.

To provide some context, I’m a Jira admin for a team of 150 users. We primarily use company-managed software projects, occasionally use company-managed business projects, and actively use Confluence spaces and pages. We’re on Jira Premium and Confluence Standard.

My target audience for these enablement materials is our everyday users—those performing tasks and interacting with Jira projects, boards, and Confluence pages—rather than developers or admins.

I believe short videos (around five minutes, give or take) showing a clear before-and-after of the changes would be the most helpful. Closely behind that would be detailed blog posts using the same before-and-after structure.

I appreciate the guide you linked—it’s helpful, but seems more developer-oriented and less accessible for non-technical or business operations users. Also, the need to click each image to compare A vs. B adds friction.

A side-by-side visual format, akin to this blog post, would be much more effective. It clearly shows “this is the new view” at a glance and adding a side-by-side image showing “this was the old view” would make it even more powerful.

In addition, regarding your Atlassian University bullet point- I think that type of training would be useful for site-admins. However, I don't believe it would be as effective for everyday users. In my experience, asking them to make time during their busy workdays for presumably a 30-minute course (could be even longer) is a lofty ask.

Warm Regards, 
Morgan Watts

[James Rickards (Spark-Nel)]

As the old saying goes, if the user can't work things out from what's shown to them on the screen, then the UX design is wrong as it is not intuitive for their audience.

In our case, our target audience are engineers. They are all clever folks used to adapting to change. We will thus not be providing any training beyond a heads up the change is coming, and an offer to explore it in our sandbox environment should they wish to do so.

For our use-case, I would suggest Atlassian folks focus on getting the in-context tip boxes that get displayed on first use to highlight the two main menu areas they should focus on, as this will be how they get acquainted to the new menus.

[Darryl Lee]

I presented the new nav at a "tech fair" today at my company. (People demoing stuff they were working on via monitors/screens at different stations in a couple of big conference rooms.)

I wish I had made this ahead of time and printed it on a big poster board, because it's what I spent my whole time explaining and showing on the small monitor they gave me:

Anyone can feel free to use my janky image. :-}

[Darryl Lee]

On a related note, I also threw together a quick Powerpoint to play automatically so that I could take a break to get snacks and a drink.

I basically copy/pasted all the text and images from first 7 rows in the table here (because my audience is only using Jira Software, not JSM):

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-articles/Jira-s-fresh-look-and-navigation/ba-p/2958737

And reformatted the content into slides:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VqzbgdB0MrzsncnMJPD5AseBWzzHKbN_pj-M-jI2aMs/edit?usp=sharing

Maybe this will tide you over while Atlassian puts together fancy official materials.

[Morgan Watts]

@Darryl Lee Thanks for the materials! I had to put together a slide deck as well for our monthly newsletter to highlight some changes. Did the same of copy + pasting from available blog posts. 

[Carolyn Glendening]

I had already posted this earlier in this thread: https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-articles/Jira-s-fresh-look-and-navigation/bc-p/2975289#M18343 but repeating/expanding here in the hopes it will help it gain traction:

• End-user ready demo videos
• Preferably a list of short, digestible demos of specific parts of the Jira (and Confluence) UI that we can point our users to
• And yes, a before and after approach would be very helpful, but in terms of this what I've experienced other solutions doing very effectively is to have *both* a "compare" set of videos and then an "intro" set that leaves out the Before (best for the long term for new users who have never used the older version
• Screenshots are a basic start, but demos are a must!

We really need these materials *before* you enforce a rollout (particularly as there does not appear to be any plan to allow individual users to switch themselves back and forth from the old to the new experience, as I would consider fairly standard best practice for large UI changes in mission-critical systems.

Thanks for asking!

[Rafa]

This is probably something that should have been thought of a few weeks or months ago.. 

[Bill Goetz]

Hey team, appreciate the hard work so far. I'd like to have more videos on the Navigation changes and I'm a bit surprised there isn't more videos in Loom ;-) or YouTube.

Ya'll have a good start with this https://support.atlassian.com/navigation/resources/ and I think you should expand on the "Navigation in One Minute" and maybe go deeper with "Navigation in Five Minutes" and "Navigation in Ten Minutes"... you get the idea. You should have videos for each of your products and have one dedicated just to Administrators as well.

I think most of my users will prefer videos and not reading about the changes.

[Darryl Lee]

@Bill Goetz thank you for posting https://support.atlassian.com/navigation/resources/

It would've been nice if @Aditi Dalal followed up her post letting us know about the work they've done. I especially appreciate this content:

Manage change within your organization

Here you can find templates, timelines, and communication resources to support the rollout of Atlassian’s new navigation across your organization. Whether you’re an admin planning the change or part of a team that needs to stay informed, these materials will help you announce the update, prepare your users, and manage the transition smoothly.

https://support.atlassian.com/navigation/docs/manage-change-within-your-organization/

[Morgan Watts]

@Bill Goetz Thanks for the link to those resources. 

Anyone else think it's ridiculous how hard it is to find information regarding the new navigation updates? Like...damn. 

[Darryl Lee]

@Aditi Dalal I've got some feedback for a few of the resources that Bill found and shared with us.

The "Old vs new" side-by-side comparisons are excellent, HOWEVER, the images as displayed in those tables are very small, and unlike in Confluence, clicking on them does not cause them to "pop up" in a larger size.

Talking about these:

• Old vs new navigation in Jira

• Old vs new navigation in Confluence

I imagine Contentful must have some way of doing this, but wow, I perused their docs, looked for videos, and holy crap does it feel very developer-centric. No wonder Product and Program Managers are posting their release notes and feature guides here. Yikes.

Ok, thought of an easier way to do this. These thumbnails (which are not actually sized down):

Should be linked to the full-sized images. It won't be pretty, but enh, it'll work:

https://images.ctfassets.net/zsv3d0ugroxu/3HG77Mgr1rm9K3gbYOiSnE/6b90416d101c827ef32119651f3843a2/JiraCloud_OldNavigation_TopToSide

https://images.ctfassets.net/zsv3d0ugroxu/2IFK7G08V77Po98JrY7ojl/0cafb2e08e00c4a26724d7363bd723d6/Jira_feature_-_Customise_sidebar.png

If there's an option to have links open in a new tab, that'd be cool. But hey, Confluence still doesn't have that, so I guess we can't fault them for that.

[Aditi Dalal]

@Bill Goetz thanks for sharing that through! @Darryl Lee @Morgan Watts sorry this didn't get to you sooner, we only published it yesterday and Bill beat me to sharing the content here! I've now put up a community post though, hopefully that helps. 

Really appreciate all the feedback here, and glad that you're finding the content useful! We'll look at creating more videos. Please keep your thoughts coming and feel free to tag me directly :) 

Cheers,
Aditi