End of the experiment, but the beginning of the new navigation

[#1]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for participating in and providing feedback on Jira’s new navigation via the Chrome extension. Your insights have been invaluable as we move into the next phase of development.

This experiment determined users' receptiveness to a conceptual change in navigation and has given us critical insights into the next phase of Jira navigation. Read on to learn more about our findings and what’s next in the pipeline.

We recognize that this is a significant change to how you work and navigate Jira. We’re confident that this change will improve the findability of your work, and uplevel the Jira and Atlassian products' experience by aligning them with industry standards and norms.

Our learnings

You can read about what was rolled out with the Chrome extension here.

What users loved about the new navigation:

• The simplicity and intuitiveness of the layout.

• The efficiency of navigating between projects quickly.

• The persistent left sidebar with easily collapsible/expandable project menu items.

• The ability to customize the sidebar by hiding/showing items.

Here is what we’re working on based on what we’ve learnt from the Chrome extension:

• The search bar in the Chrome extension currently takes up significant space in the top navigation. Future searches will be AI-empowered, providing powerful search capabilities.

• While users appreciated the customization feature, they desired more flexibility. We’re working on bringing more customization to give you more flexibility.

• The Chrome extension didn’t support admin and project settings. We’re prioritizing these experiences for future rollouts to achieve full feature parity.

• We’re optimizing screen real estate to ensure the new navigation boosts productivity.

• We received requests for new features like bookmarking projects, creating sections in the sidebar, allowing admins to set defaults for their instances, and more. We’re exploring the feasibility of these requests.

Overall, we’re striving for not just full feature parity between the current and new navigation but also focusing on ease of use, usability, efficiency, standardization, and scalability in the new navigation.

We’re listening to your feedback as we move through the development process, so please keep it coming (see below for additional feedback opportunities). Together, we can move toward a modern, streamlined, and personalized user experience across Atlassian products.

What's next?

You can continue using the Chrome extension in your instances to familiarize yourself with its look and feel. However, the Jira navigation team won’t be rolling out further changes to it. Instead, we’ll be launching an Early Access Program (EAP) later this year.

So stay tuned for more updates and continue providing feedback so we can refine the new navigation experience. We’ll keep the Navigation refresh group running and active so you can reach out to use while receiving updates from us.

As a reminder, here’s how you can give us feedback:

• Post on the group

• Take a brief survey

• After you’ve enabled the Chrome extension, select Give feedback from the left sidebar

• As an admin, you can set up time here and talk to us about your org and team’s needs

Regards,
The Jira Navigation team

[Haddon Fisher]

I know you haven't typically done this in the past, but do y'all have any plans to "show receipts" here?

• I'll own I'm just one loud rando who has only his own tastes and experiences to work off of, but "the simplicity and intuitiveness of the layout" and "The persistent left sidebar with easily collapsible/expandable project menu items" seem to be a very big stretch from my perspective. If anything, the new UI makes both of those aspects worse to me.
• There's also been a lot of feedback over the years that the ongoing UI changes are both not what people are really asking for, and that what they get isn't really valuable.

If you have polls or research you can share to explain why you think these things are true or that most of your users do actually think this is an improvement, I'd love to be the crazy one here. Not sure I am though.

[Rick Westbrock]

You mentioned "We received requests for new features like bookmarking projects" but isn't that an existing feature? Why would you remove an existing feature from the new UI?