Keep the old navigation: permanent opt-out

[#1]

Hello,

As you see in the comments of https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Navigation-Refresh-articles/The-new-navigation-Coming-to-you-in-2025/ba-p/2800982 (since it was made available), there is a lot of negative feedback coming for this navigation.

I have to full agree with all those comments stating that this is an awful regression and is really an bad design.

I need to switch often between multiple projects, dashboards, filters, and apps during my day, and many of my colleagues need as well.

Previously, all of this was easily reachable from the top navigation, sorted into categories, and showing the last accessed or favorites by group.

Now, you'll have a loooooooooooong list of sidebar items you need to scroll through, read and identify each of them.

We have a lot of similar named boards and queues, so "starring" them doesn't work, because it does not show to which projects those belong.

The comments on the linked post from top mentions a lot of valid points:

- Slows down workflow
- significant decline in user experience
- The same problems that users reported in 2018 (when this feature was later rolled back)
- causes a LOT of clutter and noise
- terrible, it feels old and antiquated
- not user friendly at all.  It introduces so much noise and makes finding things and navigating so much harder
- more confusing and cluttered
- I'll have an extra step in order to get to Your Work, Projects, and Filters
- Hours and hours of wasted productivity
- It’s cluttered, not streamlined
- UI is honestly overwhelming
- "Decluttering" shouldn't mean burying the stuff we use daily
- teams will spend more time clicking around trying to find things than actually doing their work
- You say this is about empowering users, but you’ve done the opposite
- I don't get how in 2025 you think having a Sidebar is a good idea
- It's like it has been tested with account that only have 1 project to administer

(Please go to the link above to read the comments in full and put my selection of copy&paste into context)

The quintessence is:
- Listen to your (paying!) customer base.
- Don't mess with things that are not broken. Or give the users a way out.

Atlassian was once a company that cared greatly about product usability.
Be that company again.

[Beatrice Lim]

Hi @Marco Dieckhoff 

I can introduce Flexible Space Navigation to you as a replacement to what bothered you when using the new navigation. 
To solve your issue, you can create several top bars, and categorize the named boards and place them into different navigation bars, then switch between them when necessary. 

On top of that, the top menu and submenus are 100% customizable. For example, you can create top bars based on different projects. So you won't get confused when you're working with a specific projects. 

On top of that, adding CQL and external link to the tap bar also help you to access to external data easily. 

I have a details blog that discuss about the add-on here 

[Mathew Lederman]

If only Atlassian was more interested in their backlog than their profits we could actually have a fantastic tool

[Dena Campasano]

I have been using it for 3 days and it's really not great.  It is cluttered, more difficult to find things, and reports are a mess.  The workload report in Service Desk projects is broken, and you can't easily switch reports while keeping your date range.

I am switching back, I feel like I gave it an honest try.  Please do not roll this out to everyone.

[Dominik Březina]

I´ve been using new navigation for Jira Software and Service Management for past several days and I hate it more and more.

Access to Project settings is horrible. Before it had static place where I could find it. A mundane task like adding someone to the project is a misserable experience now.

Then when I succesfully get to Project settings it replaces main navigation bar and am forced to make extra steps to get to another projects.

Working with Software and Service projects is schisofrenic. I finally managed to get my mind used to the fact that project navigation for software projects has it´s own horizontal bar in the main screen however navigation within Service projects is still within left sidebar? There is no mind-map consistency.

Every action I do in the new navigation in general takes more steps to do.

I don´t want it! In our organization we are happy with the current nav and this change brings nothing but misery to the end user.

Sure, I have probably bias, so I made an experiment. I´ve showed new and old nav to a person who never seen Jira before and old one was considered as a better solution. Have you even tried to get UX feedback?

You are literally pushing a horrible experience to end users and force Jira admins to deal with the upcoming storm...

[Debbie Jolley]

and we pay good money for this? :-(

Atlassian would have created far better response from their paying clients by fixing all the genuine issues that have languished in their backlog for years as opposed to forcing a new navigation on us all which is fraught with multiple issues.

I genuinely wonder who they got to use this in early access; what feedback did they give; and did Atlassian listen to/address any concerns? because all I'm seeing at the moment is a LOT of comments and concerns around degraded user experience and accessibility; and life being made a lot harder for admins (or any non-admins in fact) who have to constantly navigate around the whole site as opposed to staying inside a single project.

[Rafa]

Dominik Březina makes a point when saying "A mundane task like adding someone to the project is a misserable experience now".

Instead of fixing the mind-boggling mess that is the people vs users vs customer feature, they focus on prettifying a uselessly big search bar. I mean.. why do I see "service desk customers" under a project's People list (isn't that supposed to be for actual users/agents only?); oh, because these are Atlassian accounts... right.. makes sense.. o_O I wonder if once the whole company switches their portal accounts to atlassian accounts (not that they know wtf it means..) the Project > People list is going to show me a hundred users...

Speaking of inconsistencies. When opening a filter, the whole sidebar collapses and shows only filters. This shows that atlassian knows the sidebar is useless and becomes too long very quickly, so it closes the projects you had open to show all the filters; or maybe it's just internal inconsistency on the filters feature that requires a full page refresh... Equally bad.

Also, the new icon for Epics is veeery similar to the icon for Automations.

And the new STATUS colours... even Ai would have come up with a better contrast combination. Black text on dark blue..? what idiot approved that?

100% agree with Debbie's comment. Atlassian should focus on fixing the miriads of obvious errors and bugs, and terrible UX, that exist in the platform, instead of wasting everyone's time.

I bet their "UX research" was simply atlassian designers and developers being tired and bored of looking at the same UI every day, so they thought it needed to be "freshened up", make it "modern", and "streamline the experience".

*sigh*

[Aaron Geister _Trundl_]

For me this has been awesome. I live in the product(s) as a partner and I can easily get from one product to the other and close the side tab or leave it open. I can move from Confluence, loom, Jira so effortlessly. 

One of the things I think about is muscle memory and being used to a specific layout. When I tried the closed beta I was skeptical. Now that I use it daily I love it way more than the old view. 

I think for most of us change is hard and I do agree that some will just never like the views. But I do challenge everyone to see how you can move form Jira product to another so much easier. I think its been so helpful for me. 

Hope all is well.

[Mathew Lederman]

@Aaron Geister _Trundl_ how long do you think it took for you to be as efficient in the new view as you were in the old? 100 hours? 1000? Multiply that by 6,000 users × the average salary and you've very quickly come up with SIGNIFICANT waste for what benefit? To push the Search bar into the middle of the screen? to make the usable real-estate less? To clutter up the sidebar?

Let's be kind and say it takes 25 hours to becomes as efficient with the new view. × 6000 licensed Jira users in my organization = 150,000 hours spent becoming efficient. × Minimum wage in the US, $7.25 = $1,087,500!!

If we are slightly less kind and assume the minimum livable wage of $26, we're at $3.9 million dollars!!

According to Glassdoor the average salary converted to annual rate at my company is $48/hr so we're now up to $7.2 MILLION DOLLARS!!

And keep in mind, we're being kind assuming that you were able to become just as efficient in the new view as you were in the old in 25 hours. Realistically, it will take at least 100 hours for most people as they're doing daily tasks, not trying to learn a new system. So my company along is spending nearly $29 million dollars.

If somebody can give me 10 reasonable and significant benefits I can pass along to my users and executives to offset the millions of dollars lost in muscle memory, I'd be happy to adopt and even recommend this change. But without some sort of true benefit...It's just bad.

Edit:

I might have been a bit overzealous in my original estimations. In a more realistic view, an average user can expect to lose at least 5 hours in productivity due to this change. Some more advanced users will lose more time as they have to learn more functionality, and some more basic users will lose less if they only use one or two parts of the system. Even assuming 5 hours lost × 6000 users × $48/hr = $1.44 million. That's a pretty significant and realistic cost for this change. 

[Greg D]

@Aaron Geister _Trundl_ are you referring to the new nav at home.atlassian.com? I do think that is much better under the new nav.

But Jira is where most of the feedback is targeting. I wish us admins could control everything about it and set a starting view for everyone that makes more sense and is less overwhelming. If we cannot be given control, Atlassian can first fix JSM, change every section to stars only to start, hide all sections on the left under "More" except Starred, Projects (workspaces), and Filters. Then it might be less confusing. Maybe instead of unfurling a project/workspace when you go into a work item, it can just highlight the project name and keep it collapsed too. That would help.

You can find Recents under the big search bar on the top (along with a way to get to boards), and you can always add things back to the left. Look how much nicer this is as a starting point (and I do use Plans, Dashboards, Boards, and Teams):

I am trying to get familiar with it all and I understand that Atlassian is trying to make it similar across all of the Atlassian "apps" so once you learn one (e.g. Confluence), you then know how to navigate the rest of the apps in a more familiar way, but there does seem to be conflicting things happening. You want us to "get work done" but you keep adding advertisements to try new products/app that are way too prominent. If there is a gap to actually getting work done, we will seek it out and find the proper tool.

[Aaron Geister _Trundl_]

@Greg D  I think Home and the products are both easier to navigate and your right Atlassian is trying to keep parity between products. In the past the compliant was to much white real estate in the product and now it will be to cluttered. There isn’t away to make all everyone happy. I agree with your observations. it would be nice if admins could move things around more too. Maybe that’s a future.

I find it easier to get around and like that I don’t have to open a new window to get to assets or to JSM. It used to be so many different tabs to take you different places. I think they have reduced this which to me makes sense. 

It will take time to adjust. I am trying to look at the positives of the change. All products will change over time.