Ask an engineer: Behind the scenes of the new navigation

[Brett Uglow]

Hi everyone,

I’m one of the engineers who helped build the new navigation experience. We know this change has sparked a lot of discussion, and that a shift like this is disruptive.

Ask me anything about building the new navigation, and I’ll do my best to give you a transparent, detailed answer.

Curious about why we made certain technical choices? Want to know what didn’t go as planned, or what’s coming next? Drop your questions or thoughts in the comments. Your feedback is invaluable and helps us keep improving the experience for everyone.

Cheers,
Brett Uglow
Principal Engineer

[Martin Vali]

Hi, Why all the visuals are the same color - hard to distinguish

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Martin, 

That's a design question that is best answered by a designer. I have seen future designs that add more colour to the sidebar. 

There is also more user-customisation coming to the sidebar, to allow people to have more control over what is visible & what is hidden.

A technical challenge with lots of colour (color) is it can be really difficult to support unbounded colour-customisation while still keeping the text accessible. That's why when colour customisation is provided, it's usually in the form of known-accessible colour schemes.

Thanks for your question!

[Gauthier CentralPay Support]

Hello

how did you come to the conclusion on JSD to change from a contextual menu on the side depending on which project you are, and a global one top, to a global one on the side, that is cluttered and need multiple click to access what you want when you have multiple project, and having a top bar still there, but with most of the space used for a search function ?

As a user, I only see a lot of wasted space on top, and way to much information on the side that I don't need, depending on the context. I cannot hide, because as soon as I switch to another project, I'd require the hidden stuff.

Having to scroll on my side menu to get what I need is awful as user experience, especially when you have to do it a hundred time a day for work, and the fact that most of the icons are barely readable with no color or distinguishing shapes doesn't help it either.

I do understand that you want your UX to be updated but could you elaborate on what was the intent behind this change ? Was it to make it pretty, or more practical to use ?

Thank you for your time.

[Martin Flury]

There are not enough thumps up for this statement

As a user, I only see a lot of wasted space on top, and way to much information on the side that I don't need, depending on the context. I cannot hide, because as soon as I switch to another project, I'd require the hidden stuff.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

That's my main gripe as well, why do the JSD end up cluttered on the left panel and not get the full project experience of JSW/JWM?  

When it gets pushed to the left panel it's harder to find, there is no color or differentiation from the navigation items, so very difficult to work with!

I love that JSW/JWM you can have a background color/pic that really lets you know what project you are in.  JSD you are lost....

[Anne Saunders]

It would have been so nice to combine the old top-level main-nav with the tabbed project-level-nav.

Two slim tiers of controls that sit quietly at the top of my screen until I need them - with the main-nav giving me a few tidy, targeted sub-menus, and the tabs working exactly as they do - might have actually been nice.

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Gauthier, Martin, Susan & Anne,

This is also a design question (IANA designer), but I know that it's something the designers wrestled with a lot. 

There were a few guiding principles for the new navigation. One principle was to provide a consistent user experience when moving between Atlassian products.

When someone buys Google Docs Suite or Microsoft Office 365, each individual app has some common UI elements: app icon, heading, TopNav, Menubar &toolbar.

For Atlassian (to date), that common set of UI elements across apps/products has either:

• being missing (there were different elements between products), OR,
• the behaviour of common elements was not consistent between products

The new navigation (which is rolling out in 2 waves-of-product-groups) will solve these UX problems for Atlassian products.

The last point I'll mention is that Atlassian measures almost every user interaction to provide quantitative feedback on how products are performing. This data - along with your qualitative feedback - will be used to make further improvements to both individual products and the overall navigation across all products.

[Gauthier CentralPay Support]

Hello,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.
I do understand your intent, but you mentioned Google or Office, and funnily enough, both of those work with a global TOP bar, and a contextual side bar, where you did the opposite.

I think it's good to seek inspiration, and I feel like trying to imitate largely used software is a good thing when it comes to UX, so your customer don't feel lost, but making a drastic change like you did just does the opposite.

The global sidebar is something we had in the 2000's, and is mostly avoided now, especially with mobile navigation that appeared since then.

I understand that there will be another wave of improvement coming, but this won't solve the issue. There is a design flaw with a global menu on the side, and I fail to see how improvement would fix this design.

[Martin Flury]

The often promoted reason for the new navigation "decluttering the screen and helping to focus on the real thing" I don't see it at all!
The new navigation blocks more space on the screen and reduces the available area for the real work even more.

Just compare old vs. new and tell me, were can I focus better on the real work and were do I have more space to show the bords content?
(On my print screen below; I'm not complaining about the size of the the side bar, I know it's adjustable and dynamical)

Despite the fact that Atlassian is horrible in using the available space on a computer monitor efficiently.
There is often so much space left and right and just can not expand it fully.

I don't see any real progress in Atlassians products.

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Martin,

Another design question which, being an engineer, I can't really answer. But I can provide some examples that are indicative of the effort to declutter the UI:

• Sidebar user-customisation
• Tab-nav project-customisation
• Focus-mode (sometimes called fullscreen-mode)

These features weren't conceived independently, but are part of our strategy to allow people to easily access the features they commonly use and allowing them to hide the things they don't use.

[Debbie Jolley]

"Your feedback is invaluable and helps us keep improving the experience for everyone."

I really would implore Atlassian to take note of your own words.

There is a LOT of feedback at the moment and the vast majority is negative re the new 'improved' navigation.  Please listen and rethink the steam roller approach to the rollout which is currently going to create a lot of extra work for a lot of paying clients.  

[Rafa]

also, that kind of feedback should have been seeked before wasting time building the wrong solution to the wrong problem (the right problem being all the many feature requests and bug reports)

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Debbie & Rafa,

Thanks for your feedback. Again, not really an engineering question, but I can share my observations...

When I joined this project as an engineer, the design phase was ongoing. The early signals about the early designs were positive, but were qualitative (user-interviews, observing 1-on-1, surveys). Qualitative feedback needs to be considered alongside quantitative feedback (analytics). 

To get some early quantitative data, the engineering team wrote a Chrome plugin which replaced the Jira navigation with a simulation of the new navigation top-nav and side-nav. The team analysed the data, which indicated that the design was improving customer satisfaction of the navigation.

A hard-to-hear truth is that you & I are not representative of the entire Atlassian customer base. I'm an engineer, so I use Jira and Confluence accordingly. Project managers use our products differently to program-managers. Admins are different to individual-contributors. Even within a cohort (e.g. Admins), there is a large variation in how people use our products. That's why we need both qual-and-quant feedback in order to make decisions. 

The qualitative feedback is very visible on these Community pages, which leads to a perception that the "vast majority" is negative. However, the quantitative feedback indicates the new navigation is exceeding our expectations. That's why we're moving forward. 

[Dominik Březina]

Greetings!

I am very glad someone from the team offered to answer community questions. Mine are very simple:

Why you had to build it? (all considered there are more important painpoints reported from community)

Why only admins can switch to new UI for try out and not regular users? (this change will impact everyone, yet only admins can put their hands on it)

[Martin Flury]

We had to take some key users into the role of an admin, just to be able to have some basic users getting there hands on it and being able to collect feedback from the real user base for the needed training at the big roll out.

And there will be trainings needed!

[Gauthier CentralPay Support]

I might be wrong, but at least for JSD, I had an option to turn on the new UI for all agents, not only for admins.

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Dominik,

Varsha's page provides a good summary of what the new navigation is, along with how Admins can turn the new nav on/off for all users, during this initial rollout phase.

I addressed the why in an earlier response. Thanks!

[Gary Spross]

@Marine Redon posted a good question regarding the color scheming here.

[Greg D]

I had a similar thought here. I had recommended sea foam green out of preference, but what I was mainly suggesting is that some colors are not readable nor aligned across elements right now.

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Gary & Greg, please contact Atlassian Support to report bugs.

[Marco Dieckhoff]

Were any professional UX designers involved in the concept?

Scrolling through long lists of tree views with basically no distinguishable factors, where you need to read all the time to validate you are in the right "folder" might be a design choice, but it definitely isn't a usability choice.

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Marko,

Were any professional UX designers involved in the concept?

Yes, but none of them were harmed in the making of this concept.

Again - this question isn't in my wheelhouse (as an engineer) - but I can provide two observations:

• No one in Atlassian can unilaterally make changes to products without there being a lot of signals indicating that the changes have a positive effect. The new navigation is no exception.
• The head of design for Atlassian, all the way down to individual product designers, were involved in the design of the new navigation.

Thanks for your question.

[Nithya Ananda]

The new Navigation is really nice. Here is a new request from my product managers.

"Can we navigate Teams from the side bar and star the teams we are managing and keep them in the Stared list" ?

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Nithya,

Thanks for your feedback!

The best way to share this feature-request is via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar:

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Brett Uglow 

First, thank you for taking the time and offering the opportunity for customers to ask questions.

#1) There are many threads / questions on this same topic right now in the community, as there have been in the past for other design changes.  What does Atlassian plan to do differently this time in how they respond / interact with questions?  In my observation, such prompts often linger with limited responses and / or are shutdown after a time with no further posts permitted.  (e.g., the design choices behind team-managed projects, and their impact to the stability of the product ecosystem)

#2) As you note "why we made certain technical choices", are you also facilitating this same conversation topic in the developer community?  https://community.developer.atlassian.com/

Kind regards,
Bill

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your questions!

1) That's a big set of questions! Atlassian has been encouraging more employees to join the community (which is why this conversation started), which should help to reduce the time it takes to get a response.

2) I wasn't aware that there was a separate developer community (I thought this was it). I'd be happy to facilitate a conversation there in the coming weeks.

Cheers,
Brett

[Anne Saunders]

Why aren't JSM views (Boards) handled like JSW boards? Why is my Boards view gone?

[Darryl Lee]

Hi Brett -

I noticed on that around Apr 12-13 (the weekend before we were supposed to have the option to switch to the new nav) that the fonts changed.

Did your team do some "pre-staging" work updating/replacing CSS that you thought would not impact people who had not yet switched?

I wonder if you also may have pre-staged any Javascript changes as well, specifically any that may affect the Editor. In https://support.atlassian.com/requests/PCS-400760/ I describe some issues we are having on our Confluence instance that is NOT YET on the new navigation.

Specifically we are unable to edit pages that were converted from Legacy to the New Editor, even after reverting back to a Legacy version of that page.

This didn't seem to be an issue until right around the Apr 12-13 weekend when I noticed new fonts.

I've asked support to escalate the ticket, but hey, since you've made yourself available here, I thought I'd cut out the middle man. :-D

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Darryl,

The majority of the Nav4 code has been "pre-staged" since October 2024. We use feature flags to toggle it on/off for different cohorts, environments and servers. This technique is part of our normal development process in Atlassian.

When it comes time to roll out changes, we do it gradually for two main reasons:

• Risk mitigation
• Measurement

But unfortunately, due to the feature-richness (complexity) of our products, some edge case behaviours are broken and not detected before the change reaches customers. Many changes are made on any given day, and it is possible that a change on April 12-13 broke this experience.

Escalating via Atlassian Support (as you have) will ensure that it gets fixed in the shortest possible timeframe.

[Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist]

As a Jira Administrator, I need to be able to access the full list of boards and be able to do admin tasks with them. We used to be able to access them in the "For you" section -> Boards -> View all boards. Where can this be accessed in the new navigation?

[Gary Spross]

@Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist, I had asked this same question previously. You can access the list of all boards by clicking the search bar. You'll see lozenges at the bottom for Boards, Projects, Filters, Plans, & People. Why there's not a sidebar menu item for Boards is beyond me...

[Anne Saunders]

PREACH. All the Dashboards, all the Filters, all the Teams...no Boards? Seriously?

[Martin Flury]

@Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist I'm with you as I had the same question.

Under For you - Boards, you see some boards, but not all.

Click into the huuuge search box in the top menu bar and there you will see Boards at the bottom.
This is the way to finde the board overview with the search function.

[Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist]

I can see that view but I can't see the "..." menu that used to allow to go straight to the Board configuration view or copy a board, delete, etc. Where did all that functionality move to?

[Anne Saunders]

@Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist I do see the ellipsis menu, all the way over at the right edge. I also added a browser bookmark for the 'boards' page. 

[Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist]

Checking again in another instance, it seems that the "..." menu shows up only for boards associated to Company-managed projects, not for Team-managed projects.

[Martin Flury]

missing Permission?

[Martin Flury]

We're having only one single team-managed project and the board of this project is not listed in the Boards overview.
So I assume we do see in general only boards from company-managed projects then?

I'm I right with my assumption?

[Anne Saunders]

We don't use team-managed projects anymore, but from the long-distant past, I believe team managed boards have to be managed in the projects they belong to.  

I know for certain that JSM 'boards' don't actually count as boards. 

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Rodolfo & everyone,

My understanding of boards in Jira is:

• Boards are usually associated with a Jira project, but can also be associated with a person.
• Company managed Jira projects can have zero-or-many boards. Each board has its own settings, independent of the project.
• Team managed Jira projects can have zero-or-one boards. The board settings are managed as part of the project.
• JSM boards are called "views", and I don't know much more than that.

There was a lot of discussion as to how to represent boards in the new navigation. But this is really a Jira-product issue, rather than a cross-product navigation concern.

[Andrea Robbins]

One piece of feedback is the queue popout for JSM:

1. I have to click several times to see the pop out button. I have to click on the queues/work category, I have to click on a queue, and then I have to click on the button to expand the queue. Before there wasn't even a need to expand the queue so this extra work is a major set back. I need to see this popout icon when I hover over the queue/work category title. It looks so overwhelming having the queues on the left-hand side.

2. I don't think this should be per work category/section to have to do all that I mentioned in number 1 to have it pop out. I think it should just be a setting somewhere like a toggle if I want to see if on the left or have ALL of the queues popped out. No one works in just service requests or just problems. We go back and forth all the time. When I do this I have to repeat the steps in number 1 (plus having to first sending the queues back to the side bar first) just when I want to go from queues to incident section if I want them to pop out.

Also, another piece of feedback for the Jira settings portion, the Archive and delete project options are at the bottom when you click on the 3 dots. Yes there is a line in between the project settings option and the Archive and delete project options, but mental memory of a lot of admins are used to the project settings at the bottom. I can't tell you how many times I have almost deleted/archived a project when trying to go to project settings. Archiving and deletion of a project should be within the project settings itself. We are not deleting and archiving projects every day.

[Anne Saunders]

Amen and seconded to all of this. 

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Could not agree more with the JSD navigation!  So many clicks to get information not productive at all and buried in the left panel!!  Make it like JSW/JWM PLEASE.

[Anne Saunders]

How nice would the tabs in the new JSW view be for JSM? Yes, please!

[Miriam Hopton]

Chiming in to say I agree with all of this as well. 

[Brett Uglow]

Thanks for this feedback, Andrea!

If you haven't already, I'd suggest raising this via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar (see screenshot).

[Andrea Robbins]

done! For anyone else who wants to do the same, it seems like it actually creates a JSM ticket which I am assuming will be triaged and such. Really recommend we do this - hoping all watchers will see this :)

[Rodolfo Romero - Adaptavist]

I like the idea of having a search bar that gives searching capabilities in one place to all the products I have access to, for the organization I'm logged on.

What I do not like, is Atlassian mixing products (apps) from different Organizations within this section and also I do not like Atlassian pushing products that I don't even use in this section.

In the screenshot below, this organization has only 2 products: Jira and Confluence. Why do I need to see all the other options in there? And when I click on, say Trello, I get content from other organizations!

[Andrea Robbins]

I just tested this too. This is really bad/confusing. I get the mixing of products as they are like "apps" in the new ideology but mixing of data from different orgs is terribly confusing.

[Brett Uglow]

Thanks for the feedback, Rodolfo (and Andrea)! I agree that it is confusing seeing data from different orgs.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest raising this via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar (see screenshot).

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Why can't I sort my favorite dashboards and filters?  It's really painful now that they are squished into the left panel to quickly navigate to my favorites in order of my most favorite to my least.  I did end up re-ordering by un-starring them all and then re-starring them in reverse order of favorite as it put the most recent favorite at the top.  Weird.

[Anne Saunders]

It would be very cool for them to use the same functionality as 'pinning' fields in a work item.

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Susan,

The team is working on improving the ability to customise menu items further. I can't provide timelines, unfortunately, but it is a feature that we would like to support across all products/apps, not just Jira.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

I really wish that in the top search bar that I could just start typing in JQL vs having to click and click till i get to view all issues, then change the default jql to what I really want to search for.

[Michele Colson]

@Susan Hauth _ Jira Queen _, I completely agree. I wish this every time I put JQL into the search box and then realize I must open the filter section. It's so annoying. It seems that I do this daily. 

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi Michele, I do this MANY times a day...so frustrating.

[Debbie Jolley]

now THAT would be the sort of (presumably) fairly simple change that would be a complete game changer for so many users

[Martin Flury]

Use bookmarks from your browser.
I do my main navigation for a long time with browser bookmarks only. 

[Brett Uglow]

Thanks for the feedback, Susan (and everyone)! 

If you raise this suggestion via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar (see screenshot), it will go into a customer-feedback queue (JSM!), and then will be further categorised and directed to the right team for consideration.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Why was changing the navigation which obviously was a lot of development time and has provoked a lot of controversy prioritized over some of the really highly voted JAC issues?  Changing where to find stuff is NEVER on my priority list of things I would like to see fixed or improved in Jira.

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Susan,

Being a humble engineer, decisions as to what to build and when are above my pay grade! :) 

There is famous book called "Who Move my Cheese". It's about how people deal with change. I find it frustrating when products change their UI and "move my cheese" instead of fixing bugs or improving the UI.

The philosophical answer is "change is the only constant". In the movie Top Secret, the idea is expressed this way: "Things change, people change, hairstyles change... interest rates fluctuate".

I guess that Atlassian sees that improving customer-satisfaction with the navigation across all products is a higher priority than most product-specific issues. And just to be clear, the team that worked on the new navigation was just a small fraction of the entire engineering effort within Atlassian. It wasn't an "all hands on deck" effort, to the detriment of everything else. But it is a big change, and requires focus to deliver it in a coherent way.

[Dena Campasano]

On top of what everyone else has already asked, that I agree with, why was the decision made to change reports so drastically?

They worked well before, they were efficient, choosing new reports in the list in JSM kept your date range.  So when I compile my weekly, monthly, quarterly, & annual stats, I don't have to start over in every report I open.

The Workload report was a nice overview of every agent, and now you have to search for each agent individually.  

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Dena,

I'm afraid I don't know anything about how reports work/worked. I'll try to find someone who can answer your question.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

The one thing I would really would have like to see in the new navigation is an easy way for our regular Jira users (JSW/JWM) would have a button or link to easily get to the JSM Portal(s).  It's so painful and I end up asking everyone to bookmark the JSM portal as they can't raise JSM issues within Jira.  And before you say they can, they can't when there are forms involved as well as hidden request types within the portal are not hidden if creating an issue in JSM in Jira.

[Brett Uglow]

Thanks for the feedback, Susan (and everyone)! 

If you raise this suggestion via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar (see screenshot)... :-)

[Greg D]

As mentioned here, would be really helpful if site admins can define the starting point for what is hidden and shown for users when they are switched over.

[Greg D]

I ended up writing a ton about this again, so figured I should nest it as a reply.

In Orgs that have been in Cloud a long time, there are a ton of starred items and other sections that will never be needed on the left-hand panel. So the first reaction of every user that gets switched into the new view is "This is so much information and very overwhelming. I'm lost and I feel mad." They eventually get more familiar, but we would rather help make it a more positive first impression and have them focus on the actual work instead of battling their frustration. It will always be a win for Atlassian if site-admins can adjust the chosen defaults of every setting in the system and then can properly champion new features for it applies to their Orgs. Regular users can still have control from there to adjust differently.

I guess my questions are, why is everything defaulted to being shown instead of hidden to start? Why would things like Operations, Assets, and Apps take up precious real estate when those things are not being used on a site and regular users should not be focused on Apps in their day-to-day in this type of tool to get their work done? Why can't every section default to only showing Starred to out of the gate and then users can toggle each one to Starred & Recent? There is already an overall Recent bucket at the top, so more noise in each section gets wild. Why can't a site admin set the starting order and what is hidden? Why does the "For you" section still show the huge advertisement panel for Operations on the right side with no ability to collapse it?

Based on a prior discussion I had, I think you all are already aware that JSM projects are overwhelming and confusing and you are trying to provide more controls within those. JSM always seems to be an afterthought on these changes.

Of what you already built, why can't site admins just have these controls for their own users to help you all set the proper order and views for users that we know much better than Atlassian does? I think your answer is consistent documentation and trying to generate more revenue, but for the former, a simple "Your site admin can set which sections start hidden" covers documentation and for the latter, the confusion and superfluous sections just has the opposite effect of people wanting to leave the product. I am an early adopter and can get comfortable with all of this quickly. Every other person that has turned it on told me they do not like it (honestly, change is always hard and so it is an uphill battle there). Please democratize site admins to help make this better.

[Greg D]

I responded to another place, but also realized visuals could help here too...

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 reduce clutter.

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):

And it is all still there:

[Brett Uglow]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for going into these issues in depth. This is really a design question, but the designers wrestled with the line between "too many" and "not enough", and it really, really depends on your role. As you shared, for new users it is often a "too many" experience. But for people in Admin roles or having org-level responsibilities, it can feel like "not enough". Therefore, the designers have (and continue to) design for user-customisation. 

Regarding Admin-customisation, I think we want to support this capability more. But I don't have any information about work that's being done in this area..

Regarding default-hidden, this was discussed internally a lot. As you can imagine, products that were potentially hidden-by-default were not too happy with the idea, as from their perspective, "customers can benefit from our product, so why would we disadvantage them by hiding our product?". So the path taken was, "Let customers decide what they want to see and what they want to hide".

There's always tension between UX and making customers aware of new features that can help them do their work more efficiently.

[Piyush Annadate _ACE Pune_]

Seems many feedback on the way !!!


1. For different plugins, ex. JXL sheet, i need to visit, need to open any of board, then the Sheets - now that create a big confusion as JXL sheet has it's own filter or related to Board condition as SHEET IS VIEWED IN BOARD LIST.
2. 'Recent' should have differentiation - For Issues, Boards, Dashboard, etc.  

[Brett Uglow]

Thanks for the feedback, Piyush!

If you raise this suggestion via the "Give feedback" button at the bottom of the sidebar (see screenshot), it will go into a customer-feedback queue (JSM!), and then will be further categorised and directed to the right team for consideration.

[Ethans Davish]

Thanks For suggestion

[Morgan Watts]

Hello Brett, 

I'm trying to avoid treating this as a feedback thread. Personally, I'm curious about what was your favorite technical challenge that came with upgrading to the new navigation? 

Was there anything in particular that more challenging than the rest? 

I'm not an engineer, but I always enjoy hearing about problems and the mind-set y'all took to solve them!