The new navigation opt-in is now available

[#1]

The wait is over—everyone can now try the new navigation! We're excited to share that the opt-in experience is officially available for your sites.

Try it out early

✨ Can’t wait to dive in? You can opt in starting April 14, 2025 (5:45 p.m. PST).

Start exploring the new experience, get comfortable with the changes, and set your team up for a smooth transition before the new navigation becomes the default.

What’s available now?

Starting April 14, 2025 (5.45 p.m. PST), admins will begin seeing the option to try out the new navigation.

The new navigation is available on Jira, Jira Service Management, Jira Product Discovery, Confluence, and Atlassian Home. Here's what you can expect:

• Free plan: All users are already on the new navigation, which admins and users cannot turn off.

• Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plans: Admins can turn on the new navigation:

  • For just themselves

  • For everyone on the site

• Sandbox environments: Admins can self-serve and choose to turn on the new navigation.

What’s coming next?

We’re continuing to roll things out in phases to make sure everything runs smoothly. Here’s a look at what’s planned:

• Standard plan: Rollout begins in mid-April 2025 and will continue through mid-May 2025.

  • Once your site is on the new navigation, admins can no longer turn it off; it will be enabled for all users.

  • However, for Jira and Atlassian Home, users can still turn off the new navigation only for themselves till the end of May 2025. This will not affect anyone else on the site.

• Enablement materials: The navigation resource hub is now live! Thank you for your patience while we were working on it. Additionally, here are other official help articles for the new navigation:

  • Jira’s new navigation

  • Confluence’s new navigation

  • Atlassian Home’s new navigation

We’re following a planned schedule and will continue to share specific dates and updates along the way. See the timelines here.

What to expect?

Depending on the product, you can access admin controls to turn on the new navigation from April 14, 2025 (5.45 p.m. PST).

• For Jira, go to Settings > Personal Jira settings. 

• For Confluence, go to Settings > Configuration > New feature.

• For Atlassian Home, go to Settings > Personal settings.

⚠️ While the rollout begins immediately, it may take up to 3 days to reach all sites. Thanks for your patience as it rolls out. 

We know some users are concerned that rollout dates might be uncertain, but we want to assure you that we're sticking to the schedule and will keep you informed every step of the way.

In the meantime, join our focus group to stay updated, ask questions, raise concerns, and connect with the team working on the new navigation.

Cheers,
The Atlassian navigation team

[Valerie Knapp]

More than 'opt-in', it is being pushed onto end-users who won't have any idea what it is or why things have changed dramatically for them.

[Alfonso Leiva]

Hi!

Am I the only one not being able to find the option in Jira?

Is it under Settings - System, and then something else?

For Confluence I do see New features, but I don't see the new UI/navigation as an option.

[Wurm Peter]

You are not. As they article says: "While the rollout begins immediately, it may take up to 3 days to reach all sites. Thanks for your patience as it rolls out. "

[Apryl Harris]

It's day 3 and my org does not have the opt-in option. 

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Varsha Patel - i can only imagine the crazy stress from community and with the actual roll out and implementation, etc of the new navigation. Kudos to you and the team, nonetheless :D

Brace yourselves for the further push back and complaints as it is rolled out.

@Valerie Knapp yeah, it is not ideal at all ... what we did is send out a company wide email sharing the resources that Varsha provided. We, as admins, will need to hand-hold for a while after this is implemented.

I will look at this next week again as I was keen to check it out on our production cloud instance for myself but it was not available under either of the 3 options.

Thank you

Yatish

[Ariel Kauan]

Varsha, 

Where is it available? Not here.

I have 3 environments, with different plans. And in none of them do I have the option to enable the feature.

[Miriam Hopton]

I noticed the feature is in an odd place if you are an admin and had to enable it in Jira and in Confluence (we use both).

In the Jira side,  upper right corner, go to Settings / Personal settings / General

Scroll down and you will see the button to Turn on for everyone:

Admins will have to toggle the "Turn on just for you" to see it. I turned it on for everyone and did not see the changes on my end until I toggled it on for myself.

---

To turn it on in Confluence, you have to go to: Confluence Administration / Admin / Configuration / New Features. You'll see the new features in there to enable. I turned all 3 on, why not! 

[Dominik Březina]

Is it possible to give regular users option to try new layout? By "The wait is over—everyone can now try the new navigation!" I thought that literally everyone can try it :(

I tried the new UI and frankly it is very uncomfortable and totally different to my learnt patterns. I understands it will take some time to get used to it however regular user isn´t going to have same amount of patience as Jira admins.

I want to give our users an opportunity to try things out. Better to do it step by step and be thrown into the deep waters. And I am super worried of a scenario in which this change will be forced during our busy week of closing tickets and sending invoices. Users and business will be furious.

[Varsha Patel]

Hi everyone, the navigation resource hub is now available here. If you need additional resources, please leave a comment on this article.

[Brad Hosking]

Is there anyway we can allow not just admin's to try this? I assume if I click on "enable for everyone" it will change everyone's naviagtion immediately without the option for them to enable it by themselves?

[Mark B Wager]

I agree @Brad Hosking about the current “enable for everyone “ button. 

@Varsha Patel please set the initial individual DEFAULT to OFF when the button is clicked. 

I want to communicate to our users that they can try it —> then giving them the control to turn it ON (and Off) themselves for their own testing. 

Currently, in my sandbox testing, if I turn it on for all users it defaults to ON for everyone with an ability to toggle it off. This is fine for the sandbox I suppose, but NOT for production. We MUST let users Opt IN at their own pace. 

Thanks

Mark

[Ariel Kauan]

@Varsha Patel Although the statements say that administrators and users will be able to enable and test, here only administrators can do so. The user does not see anything (as Brad Hosking said).

I gave the company notice of the date (April 14th), and it didn't show up until three days later. And when I told the user that he could test it, I saw that he didn't have that option.

[Alvin Rodis]

Hello - I'm looking for clarity based upon the comments in this article. We have a Premium subscription to Jira and JSM and Standard for Confluence. Prior to the rollout of the new navigation by Atlassian, can individual users enable the new navigation to test for themselves?

I realize that as an admin I can turn it on for the entire instance, but I am not looking to do that at the moment. In working on our rollout comms plan we want to have users enable it for themselves if they'd like without turning it on for the entire instance.

Bottom line...can users enable the new navigation for themselves (Jira/JSM/Confluence) prior to the Atlassian rollout without the admin turning it on for the instance? Thank you!

[Darryl Lee]

Alas @Alvin Rodis the answer is currently NO.

@Varsha Patel can you explain why?

If you can enable Admins to individually turn on the new nav for themselves, then it seems like the pieces are there to let Users also do this.

As many of us have mentioned before and recently, this would REALLY be a smoother rollout if all users could opt-in on their own, as it was done in the 2020. Maybe there's a retrospective about that rollout still on your internal Confluence that you could refer to?

Or you could just read this entire thread:

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-articles/A-better-navigation-for-Jira-Cloud-is-coming-soon-available-now/ba-p/1216077

Specifically this comment from @Dennis Walsh :

I appreciate the statement that "We are also putting you in control of this change. Once your instance receives the new navigation, each of your users will be able to switch over to the new navigation on their own timeframe."  These changes look promising, but users still like to at least feel like they're in charge of their environment.

This is much better than the "just get used to it" approach used by certain "other" software companies (which shall remain nameless) who simply force-feed all of their "enhancements" on their users in one swoop, leaving the users either powerless to undo things, or -best case- forced to flail about and try to figure out on their own how to get their interface back to the way they want it.

[Bill Goetz]

@Alvin Rodis as a Premium customer, you have the option for sandboxes. You could enable the new navigation for all users in the sandbox. That's what we have done. Just another option.

[Varsha Patel]

@Darryl Lee @Alvin Rodis Based on our research with admins over the last 12 months, we’ve found that allowing user-level opt in makes it difficult for admins to provide ad-hoc support to users across different versions of the product. Admins specifically asked for this level of control over their sites.

[Varsha Patel]

@Alvin Rodis As @Bill Goetz pointed out, you can enable the new navigation on Sandboxes before turning it on for everyone on the production site. 

[Varsha Patel]

@Ariel Kauan An admin will have to turn on the new navigation for everyone for users to see it on their sites. 

[Darryl Lee]

@Varsha Patel wrote:

@Darryl Lee @Alvin Rodis Based on our research with admins over the last 12 months, we’ve found that allowing user-level opt in makes it difficult for admins to provide ad-hoc support to users across different versions of the product. Admins specifically asked for this level of control over their sites.

I don't know who these admins are you interviewed, but in the threads here, I've only seen ONE admin who thinks letting users opt-in would be "an administrative nightmare", who wrote:

As an admin, I want to know what experience my users are on so I don't have to have another layer to solving their issues. And I want control of that, not them. The sandbox is there for them to get used to it at their own pace before I turn it on for them in production. Email communications and office hour meetings/demos are provided for them to attend prior to it going live in production. If they aren't ready by time the rest of the org is ready for it, then tough luck. I'm not going to try to assist my users in a situation where half of them are on one experience and the other half aren't because they didn't want to accept change.

I replied:

Hi Gregg Brown  - I respectfully disagree.

People who OPT-IN to a new UI experience are self-selecting to "try the new thing". They're motivated to figure it out themselves. This is how I suspect that Atlassian got their < 3% opt-out rate during their EAP and Beta programs for the new UI. Of course those people stuck with the UI. They CHOSE to be testers for it.

So I don't think they're going to be generating a lot more work for you.

And the people who don't opt-in before the deadline? Well, yes, as you say, I don't have a lot of sympathy for them, but I believe that many of them, if they go back to the emails and see that they could've opted-in at any time prior to the deadline, will very likely say "Oh crap, yeah, my bad. I missed those emails. I could've switched over myself earlier."

IN CONTRAST, what I predict will happen is that yes, people will ignore the emails/Slack messages/signage/demos that we will also send out ahead of time.

But on the day we cutover, they're going to scream bloody murder. And they'll say "Why are you FORCING this on us?"

It's a matter of perspective (and frankly psychology) that was expressed well by Dennis Walsh regarding how they rolled out the Nav change of 2020:

I appreciate the statement that "We are also putting you in control of this change. Once your instance receives the new navigation, each of your users will be able to switch over to the new navigation on their own timeframe."  These changes look promising, but users still like to at least feel like they're in charge of their environment.

This is much better than the "just get used to it" approach used by certain "other" software companies (which shall remain nameless) who simply force-feed all of their "enhancements" on their users in one swoop, leaving the users either powerless to undo things, or -best case- forced to flail about and try to figure out on their own how to get their interface back to the way they want it.