The new navigation: Coming to you in 2025

[Hollie Victory]

I'm going to be blunt: this new navigation is awful. It’s frustrating, intrusive, and feels like change for the sake of change, not something that actually improves the user experience. I get that you want to pump out new features that excite people, but this has the opposite effect.  

Here’s the reality:

• It’s cluttered, not streamlined. The persistent sidebar is a massive pain, especially when screen space matters. Because of the tree structure, some of my queues have long names, so I have to push out the menu more to see the full name. The UI is honestly overwhelming.
• It feels like you’ve added more noise, not clarity. "Decluttering" shouldn't mean burying the stuff we use daily. I work on many projects, and I don't want to see all the other projects while I'm working on the one I need to be.
• My teams will spend more time clicking around trying to find things than actually doing their work, which is the opposite of what this update is supposed to help with!
• The community feedback is loud and clear—it's bad. But instead of taking that on board, you’re pushing ahead and locking everyone in. It feels like user needs are an afterthought.

You say this is about empowering users, but you’ve done the opposite. If this is still in beta and "being shaped by feedback," please act on what people tell you: give us the choice to opt out permanently! I would love not to burden my team with this garbage. 

The only part I do like is the new display in Jira Admin Settings. But this will only satisfy me, not the rest of the organisation, which must work primarily on projects. 

BTW, the Confluence new UI is awful as well. 

We use Atlassian tools every day. This change will actively make our jobs harder. 

[Marco Dieckhoff]

I have to full agree with all previous 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.

I can only repeat from above messages:

Listen to your (paying!) customer base.
Don't mess with things that are not broken.

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

[David]

It's actually genuinely impressive how Atlassian manages to change things no one asked to be changed, while simultaneously failing to rectify issues that have been reported for years. For example, the advertising of apps and features to the end users causing confusion amongst them and a significant increase in requests to administrators. Look at this. Reported in 2022. Still not fixed, because you don't want to "fix" it - you want users to bug admins to spend more money [JRACLOUD-79285] Turning the Product recommendations OFF has no effect - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.

And as usual, the comments from the community are based as hell. Because, you know, they actually use Jira to do real work. You are just busy bodies looking to justify your continued employment. Kind of like an HR department rolling out initiatives that no one asked for and which provide no benefit to the organization.

Roll this back or give us the option to toggle the old view.

Edit: You can turn it off. Of course, I assume this is only temporary and eventually we will all be forced onto the new UI. To change it back in Jira, upper right corner, go to Settings / General settings / Scroll down to "Jira labs" and click the toggle for New navigation.

[Anne Saunders]

I DO like the tabs in the projects, but I don't see why we can't have 2 tiers of horizontal navigation. Main nav across the top of the screen for Projects, dashboards, filters, global apps, teams, and boards (which are just inaccessible right now unless you find the Boards page in your history and bookmark it); with project based nav via tabs below the project identifiers. 

[Don Arsenault]

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Navigation-Refresh-articles/The-new-navigation-Coming-to-you-in-2025/bc-p/3001027#M243

Just don't make the non-scrollable header bigger!

[Mark B Wager]

Hi @Varsha Patel 

I see this rolled out to my Sandbox. Yay!

I have a couple of communication questions:

1. As admins, will we be able to control the BANNER that appears? 
   • I want to control WHEN my users get access so I can control our roll-out (i.e., communication, training, 'all-on-the-same-page", etc.). If the banner appears, it will cause a LOT of CONFUSION for our users.
     
     
   • I don't see why our USERS would need this.  As admins, we can post our own banner with a link to our own, specific Confluence page with information, links, screenshots, etc.!
      
     
      
2. Are 'banners' the only way you'll be notifying users of the changes?
   • I want to control the roll-out, including our communication with our user-base. So, having Atlassian notifications would be confusing.
   • If you DO plan to send emails, can we get a heads up on the email so we can warn our users?
3. As admins, how will we be notified of the exact date the OPT OUT will end?
   • Obviously, to make the smoothest transition, we'll want to communicate to our users the date so they will feel the pressure to check out the changes themselves.
   • And as for the OPT IN date for our users, will that be specifically communicated to us as admins?
4. As admins, what emails should WE expect to see related to our sites?
   • I've been watching this Product Feedback group, but there's several different Atlassian folks posting information. It's really hard to stay in the loop. (And I get so much email that these 'forum' comments & updates get lost in my inbox.

Thank you!

Mark

[Gauthier CentralPay Support]

Just tried the new UI, and so far most of the users have negative feedback about it. 
I don't get how in 2025 you think having a Sidebar is a good idea. Everything is cluttered here and you have to scroll like crazy to access what you want, and when you find the menu, you have to make multiple click you to access what you want.
It's like it has been tested with account that only have 1 project to administer.

I just miss the fact to go on ONE project, and having only stuff for that project displayed.
Having stuff for all project all the time is really a waste of space 90% of the time.

Also, my company use Gitlab, and it was really handy that most of the ui was similar to it, so dev woudn't ask me all the time how to find what they are looking for.

you have to let us use the old one permanently, at least until you come with a better way to fix the UI.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

After reading everyone's comments about the new navigation (which I think I'm very happy we haven't moved to yet), I would like to ask someone from Atlassian (@Varsha Patel) to create a Quick Reference Card for Confluence with:

feature/task

How you used to do/access it

How you do/access it now

In addition to giving us all a reference to use and give our other users, I feel that the exercise will point out to Atlassian how much the new navigation does not improve anyone's experience.

[Apryl Harris]

The new nav in Confluence is the easy part. The new nav is Jira is a bit more challenging.

I do agree with @Barbara Szczesniak - a quick reference card or a short but detailed video for Jira/Confluence highlighting the changes per app, or any of the Atlassian tools getting the new nav, would be EXTREMELY helpful. For example - finding boards, who would have thought one would have to hover over the project name to see the caret to click to reveal the boards.

@Varsha Patel @ Atlassian - can we count on Atlassian to deliver the above request within the next couple of days? 

Thank you.

[Henri Seymour _Easy Agile_]

I would also like to know if there is any training or reference material coming for this change, for: 

• Cloud users getting swapped to the new nav 
• Users who have been migrated from Data Center and need to learn the new nav (unlike the old Cloud nav, the new Cloud nav is drastically different from the Data Center UI) 

Resources to support this second group is something I asked about in a meeting in October 2024, but it sounded like that wasn't planned. 

[Varsha Patel]

Hi all,

This article was specific to the Early Access Program (EAP) phase and is no longer actively monitored. We're now in the General Availability (GA) phase, where you can opt in to the experience.

For the latest updates, please refer to Atlassian’s new navigation: General availability, and join our focus group to stay updated, ask questions, raise concerns, and connect with the team working on the new navigation.

In the meantime, here are the resources and reference materials.