We’re continuing with the new navigation rollout — here’s why

[#1]

Hi everyone,

We’d like to take the time to address community feedback around delaying the rollout. Firstly, our apologies for being quiet on the matter - we have been considering our options here very seriously, weighing the impact on your teams, the feedback from our largest customers, and the technical trade-offs involved. After careful deliberation, we’ve decided to move forward, and we want to share our reasoning.

Please know that we are deeply aware of how difficult this change is, and the amount of training and effort that is required to adjust to changes as fundamental as navigation redesigns. We understand shifts in core workflows can have a measurable impact on productivity, and we don’t take that lightly. We’ve heard your concerns about UI inconsistencies and clutter challenges, and we recognise these aren’t just cosmetic issues. They’re critical to your day-to-day experience. Clearly, there are areas that still need polish, and we’re actively working on them.

Why not delay?
We know some teams would prefer a slower rollout, but unfortunately there’s no perfect release strategy, and we need to strike a balance between the needs of those wanting/expecting this change and those who need more time.

Many of our largest customers, including two of Australia’s biggest supermarket chains, have already made the switch without any major issues or blockers. In fact, nearly 3 million users are now using the new navigation, and fewer than 1% have chosen to opt out. This tells us that most people are adjusting smoothly, and that the new experience is working well for the vast majority.

This update more than just a UI change. Behind the scenes, we’re investing heavily in a true platform approach: unifying the underlying technology that powers navigation across all our products. This means we can deliver improvements—like better performance, more customisation options, and new features—much faster and more reliably. Instead of fixing the same issues in multiple places, we can make changes once and see the benefits everywhere, helping us respond to your needs more quickly and effectively.

Delaying the rollout will only set platformisation and further improvements back even more. The longer our teams are dedicated to supporting two navigation systems and safely rolling out the UI, the more it slows down improvements for everyone—there’s a real engineering and opportunity cost to supporting both.

What’s different this time?
We’ve learned from past navigation changes. Previously, updates were one-off projects driven by individual product teams and often stagnated until the next big redesign. This time, we’re doing things differently—with a dedicated team focused solely on navigation. We're not just here to launch this version and move on. We're here to listen, iterate, and improve continuously.

That means the new navigation won’t stand still. It will keep evolving based on your feedback—getting better over time, not just once every few years. 

What’s next?
We know change takes effort, and we’re here to support you through it. A reminder that support resources are available at https://support.atlassian.com/navigation/resources/, and we recommend you work closely with your CSMs on this change as well. 

We’re also opening up research sessions to better understand how the new navigation is working for you in practice. If you’re open to sharing real-time data from your instance, so we can see firsthand what’s working, what’s not, and where the blockers are - watch this space! Your feedback will (and already is) directly inform how we prioritise improvements and address pain points.

Cheers,
Aditi
PM, Atlassian Navigation Team

[Mohammed Abdul]

Hi 

There is no mention on what the improvement will be in the new navigation team and what is prioritised from all the feedback captured? Just more feedback we should watch out for in open sessions. 

You can clearly see from all the customers comments and negative perception of the new layout that at least provide us roadmap on what is being worked on now and how we all can track this change and when it is due to be rolled out.

Disappointing article, as usual Atlassian makes a big change without taking into consideration the Admin perspective, as they will be the ones who will handle the backlash from their existing users.

[Marine Redon]

"In fact, nearly 3 million users are now using the new navigation, and fewer than 1% have chosen to opt out."

I don't know if that really means 2.9M people are happy with it, considering everyone will have to adopt it sooner or later. Opting out only delays the inevitable, doesn't it? These users simply have bitten the bullet already.

I understand this update makes it a lot easier for Atlassian moving forward. Unfortunately it's at the cost of your users' productivity. I am holding back the roll-out to my company for as long as I can in the hopes that some feedback will be actioned before I am forced to do so, but it sounds like that will only happen after the roll-out. Which will cause further confusion to my team as I will need to repeatedly explain new changes to them.

[Debbie Jolley]

Putting aside my concerns over the changes themselves, one of my biggest concerns with the rollout timeframes is that no one seems to have considered that end of July for Premium users hits the peak summer holiday period in the northern hemisphere.

I would also strongly suspect that an organisation with approx 3 million users will have the luxury of a department of people dedicated to being able to actively manage the training and support required for such a large impactive change in a way that smaller organisations may not (I personally have to fit atlassian admin work around my day job).  So, the overhead/impact, per head count, in organisation in the hundreds, and possibly thousands, of users, will actually be far worse than for a super large organisation.

But an org with 3 million users will be paying you more - and they're in Australia - so you've literally explained 2 key reasons in your article why you're pretty much ignoring the very large amount of feedback/concerns coming through these forums

[Sami Shaik]

Dear @Aditi Dalal & Atlassian Team,

As a long-standing loyal Atlassian user, and active member of the Atlassian community, I want to start by acknowledging the enormous effort your teams have invested in platform unification and UI innovation. I understand and appreciate the vision behind the new navigation and the long-term gains a unified experience may bring.

However, I must express sincere concern over the current rollout strategy.

While you mention that the majority of users have adopted the new UI without major blockers, this metric alone does not reflect the depth of the disruption being felt by many users—especially org admins, admins, and organizations that rely heavily on Jira for operational continuity. Just because users haven’t opted out doesn’t mean they aren’t struggling with real productivity losses or confusion. Many are simply enduring the change, not embracing it.

The statement that delaying the rollout would slow future improvements feels dismissive of the immediate usability, consistency, and accessibility concerns raised across the community. These are not fringe issues—they are core to user confidence, daily task execution, and onboarding/training efforts. In large environments, even subtle UI inconsistencies can cause measurable friction and extended retraining costs.

Key concerns include:

• UI clutter and cognitive overload from inconsistent menu behavior

• Increased time to access commonly used tools and filters

• Broken mental models, especially for users switching between projects or products

• Lack of configuration options for organizations with diverse teams and use cases

While I welcome the commitment to continuous improvement and future customization, pushing forward without addressing foundational UX feedback feels premature—and arguably, avoidable. We understand platform evolution takes time and comes with trade-offs, but at the very least, allowing a longer opt-out period or giving customers more control over when to transition would reflect a more balanced and customer-centric approach.

I urge Atlassian to re-evaluate the rollout pace, consider extending opt-out options until key usability issues are resolved, and improve real-time transparency into what's actively being addressed in response to user feedback.

Thank you for your openness and ongoing efforts—but please know that friction like this erodes user trust, no matter how noble the long-term goal.

[Josh]

@Aditi Dalal thank you for the update and additional rationale.

We can see and understand the potential for this reworked and standardized UI.

Has there been any consideration to speeding up the implementation of the features to alleviate the biggest pain points expressed by reticent users so far? This article describes the decision process between Option A (move forward as planned) and Option C (slow or pause the rollout). However, the middle ground would be Option B (quickly address the most pressing needs).

There has definitely been a ton of work up to this point to make the new UI production-ready, but it still doesn't feel feature complete. On the continuum between minimum viable product (MVP) and feature complete, it leans more towards the MVP side.

0 [MVP] - - - 4 [New UI] - - - - - 10 [Feature Complete]

For a change this highly impacting, it'd be better to err on the side of completeness than the typical Atlassian MVP approach to new products (e.g. so many new products / features ship without native backup/restore capabilities). It may be acceptable for smaller companies to get a half-baked cookie out of the oven, but at enterprise scale we'd like to mitigate against salmonella as much as possible...

[Rafa]

Disappointing.

> nearly 3 million users are now using the new navigation, and fewer than 1% have chosen to opt out.

Well, is it even possible to opt out now? It was possible for some weeks, but there was a deadline to when opting out wouldn't be an option anymore.

I am one of the people who have not opted out, not because I like it, but because I may as well get used to it as soon as possible before the rest of the organization starts complaining and ask questions.

Furthermore, as Josh mentioned, your two options are not the only ones.

You could leave the old nav active while you work on the new one. Given the situation, I'm pretty sure it is better to stay in the old nav even if you do Zero work to improve it and focus 100% on the new nav; we will make it work. And once you do a truly improve the new navigation to make it actually better and worth it, then we will switch. Then your metrics will truly show that people are willingly switching to the new UI.

[Carolyn Glendening]

I won't repeat what others have already said (and they are right on the mark) but I will add, as one of the organizations who won't be *forced to update* until July, we have been watching the feedback on entirely legitimate issues with growing alarm, and up until now have been assuming that surely Atlassian will respond in a three-pronged fashion:

1. Address at a minimum the most serious issues (which have received consistent feedback) with the UI/UX  that slow productivity. And proactively communicate a prioritized list and timeframe for addressing.
2. Postpone the rollout for the remaining license levels, along with extending the opt-out period, until these issues are addressed. 
3. Augment the end user-friendly resources to be truly what we need to bring users along (there's a good start, but definitely not there yet.)

Essentially, a new MVP Baseline must be established in order for this transition to be viable. As it is, the message we are receiving is that you are dismissing the feedback you have received and steamrolling ahead, and IN ADDITION we can expect the UI to be constantly changing underneath us in an unpredictable fashion while we struggle with the needs and support of our users.

Thank you for taking the time to consider this additional feedback, and I'm holding out hope that the fine folks at Atlassian will take another look!

[John Dunkelberg]

As an organization who is actively evaluating migration from Datacenter to Cloud, we'll continue to watch with interest.

[Dwight Holman]

As a Jira + Confluence Admin, I regularly search for and follow JAC tickets before contacting Atlassian Support. Internally Atlassian must have a much clearer view of the rate of issues/suggestions and changes deployed - perhaps this data justifies Aditi's message.

From an outside perspective the trend for JRACLOUD below does not suggest the rate of new Nav-related issues is flattening yet. 

Disclaimer: there is no easy way I could find to specifically find/locate New Nav issues - here is my (crude) search JQL:

project = jracloud AND (summary ~ "New navigation" OR component in ("Navigation - Top", "Navigation - Sidebar") AND summary ~ new) and created > '2024-05-01' ORDER BY resolved ASC

[Rick Westbrock]

I think it would go a long way to alleviate customer pain if Atlassian would include configuration options for some of the changes so that customers could disable a specific part of New Nav. For me that would be the icons as they are much harder to quickly distinguish.

I understand this would require more development hours by Atlassian and not everything could be configurable but at least it would be better than nothing.

I also have to mention that it is really odd to me that the work item type icons for JSM projects (change, incident etc.) were not updated along with the other icons. Don't get me wrong I prefer the old style but it's another example of JSM being treated as a second class citizen as far as changes to the UI and UX are concerned (yes New Transition Experience, I am talking about you).

[Suzie Ahlers]

Hi all - making sure that you saw this post on the research study on the new navigation experience.