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The new "All Work" tab is confusing our newer Jira users.

James Rickards _Spark-Nel_
Contributor
May 1, 2025

OK, I just ran into a novel UX scenario on the first day of rollout to our users.  It is to do with the new "All Work" tab on the horizontal menu of a project.

In the past to search "all work" users would have used the "Advanced Search" or "Filters" screen which is clearly project agnostic.

With this new horizontal menu, and the project name now shown the "all work" tab, these newer users are intuiting that their query results are project specific, like the "list" tab does. This resulted in them seeing work items from other projects.

With the "search" dialoged being so visible in the new UX, I don't see a reason for this "All work" tab.

I would suggest that Admins remove this new 'all work' tab on your project's horizontal navigation menu prior to enabling the new UI. This will avoid you facing users with a similar confusion and reduce some of the cognitive load on your users through a simpler screen.

Example, showing how you can search for items not in the project but within the project.

Screenshot 2025-05-02 080540.png

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Martin Flury
Contributor
May 1, 2025

@James Rickards _Spark-Nel_ I do understand the confusion of having two tabs for showing issues. I assume Atlassian will merge them once.

You stated your new users are intuiting to see project specific results, but this is correct and they are not wrong. When you open the "all work" tab, the default search is set to the current project (as your print screen shows). 
So did your users assume even when changing "project = ..." in the query, the results would still be project related?

The problem with the organisation of the tabs in a project, you can not organize them globally.
You would have to arrange, rename or hide them in each and every project.
We have around 1500 project and I'll definitely not gonna do this manual work, even if I agree there would be a better organization of the tabs as they are by default.

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Anne Saunders
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May 29, 2025

@Martin Flury My intuition is that the users who are getting confused aren't including 'project' in their queries at all, because they expect the All Work Tab within a project to be limited to filtering within that project, rather than a global filter. 

I love the flexibility of the All Work tab, but I have been renaming it. 

Global tab admin (at least per product or project category) would be a massive improvement.

Martin Flury
Contributor
June 1, 2025

@Anne Saunders Another problem with the "all work" tap multiple users run into, is having the option "Show hierarchy" ON.
(I would turn this OFF, if I could do it globally ....)

Many of our users were used to when looking for a issue (sorry, I'll stick to the "issue" therminology ;-) ) they do sort the table (not filtering) and scroll.
But when you sort, e.g. after Assignee and scroll to the Assignee you are looking for, you won't see all issues, as there are more grouped under epic.

So I can just tell them again and again:

  • If you sort the table view, turn off the "Show hierarchy" in order to really finde all issues.
  • or work with filters (basic or JQL) 

I'll not touch name and order of the tabs, as this arround 1500 projects have to look the same and as long as there is no global setting for this tabs, they are as they are.

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Anne Saunders
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June 2, 2025

Yep. I like 'Show Hierarchy' for the List and Timeline views, but that's not how a filter should ever work. 

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