8 ms·

I worked on that new Jira UI (codename Bento) and it was a constant source of embarrassment for me. I pushed hard to get the powers that be to focus more on per

by mdoms 6y ago

I worked on that new Jira UI (codename Bento) and it was a constant source of embarrassment for me. I pushed hard to get the powers that be to focus more on performance and payload, but it was a Sisyphean task. It was perhaps the most demotivating job of my career because I disagreed with virtually every decision that was ever made with regards to that UI, from technology choices (the inane choice to use RxJS despite literally no valid use cases, the 5+ Redux stores in the same page, etc) to UI layout decisions (insane whitespace, the baffling choices about which things go in the right hand gutter...). The components were mostly handed down to us from a company-wide UI team whose main design goals were to bring commonality across all Atlassian products. This is a worthwhile goal, no one thinks that it makes sense that Atlassian has different editors and even markup languages between (and even within) products. But the result was dog-slow overweight components like the Atlassian editor which tried to be everything to everyone. So when you need to bring in a monolithic highly-customisable 12mb+ component for every text edit field then things spiral out of control quickly. One cool thing, though, is that these components are open source[0]. And it looks like some performance/payload work has been done since I left, thank god. In my new job I use Jira Server which hasn't been infected with the updated UI, and it's a shame because other than that terrible UI there have been big meaningful updates in Jira. But I'm dreading our inevitable migration to Cloud. [0] https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit/src/master/

stevoski 6y ago
This is fascinating to hear. Sometimes with Jira updates, I have to ask myself “What WERE they thinking?” It’s good to hear that actually some people (well, at least one!) inside the org ask this too.
threeseed 6y ago
> I pushed hard to get the powers that be to focus more on performance and payload If I was in Atlassian's situation this would be the last thing to focus on. a) This is the biggest ever rewrite of their most important products. In this situation maintaining feature set compatibility is always going to be priority A, B to Z. b) Their paying customers are mostly in the enterprise space who have very fast internet and stable environments i.e. payloads are quickly cached.
- taurath 6y ago
  The key is jira and most atlassian products are feature mountains to be sold to upper management, but I can think of no end-user person that likes to deal with it on a daily basis. Then someone in the vein of slack or Asana comes around and eats atlassians lunch because they’ve neglected making the product good for anyone other than executives.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    1) End users are not the buyer. It's the Head of Delivery, Iteration Managers, Agile Consultants etc that are. For them JIRA is great because it's heavily customisable and scales across the enterprise. It's actually quite hard to balance this with a great end user experience. 2) They are in the middle of a complete UI rewrite and I've only briefly used it but it's definitely much better than the previous versions. I imagine the Trello acquisition is also going to help them here.
  - chrisandchris 6y ago
    I actually use Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence (all Server versiob) in a small team (maybe 5 people) and I really enjoy it. It‘s good in what it does, it does the things you want it to do and the 3 tools are good integrated. For my other team members, they enjoy Confluence more than Jira, because Jira feels a bit difficult.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  Well, they have succeeded in turning my entire team off JIRA. We basically don't use it anymore, mostly because their A B Z priorities didn't include making it not feel painful to use.
  - codyb 6y ago
    It's crazy to me when I can't type in JIRA... or when I drag a ticket to a new column, and it just doesn't go, and I reload and it's still in the old column. Or when I try to click a ticket and it just doesn't open. The not being able to type fluidly has to be the worst though. Our team has as well at least brought up the idea of potentially trying other products. Some of it's probably me not really wanting to get involved with JIRA in the first place (who wants to manage tickets), but in the interest of being a better employee I've been trying to make sure I'm squaring out my work properly for tracking, etc. And there's certain things, that I'm sure are there, but I just can't find sometimes. Like... how to add an epic easily. There's at least three different views for each ticket (when you create it, when you click it open into the modal, and the full screen view), and things are apparently in different places on those different views? I'll take some of the blame, but it's a mess.
wmichelin 6y ago
I do enjoy the new Jira UI a lot more than the old one, but yes it is definitely slower and is missing some key features (hotkeys for editing specific ticket fields please!). Things have been improved with the recent addition of pinned ticket fields, but they still have a long way to go.
disgrunt 6y ago
These JIRA UI updates are also an accessibility nightmare.
trhway 6y ago
>whose main design goals were to bring commonality across all Atlassian products. This is a worthwhile goal the issue here isn't the goal itself, it is that such highly visible efforts - "common platform", "common UI", etc. which are very complex technically to do right - invariably bring up to the top and into the deciding positions those "drivers of cross-organizational/functional/etc. change" style people whom you'd really want to be staying far from such important and complex technical issues... I worked with Jira in 2012-13, it was appallingly slow. Making it even slower is an achievement.
tobr 6y ago
> insane whitespace Good to hear that there’s at least one person involved with it that sees the problem with this. I imagine how the use of whitespace to organize the layout probably looked very simple and attractive in Sketch or Figma at some point. Then reality crept in, and that whitespace was gradually carved up into more and more incoherent pieces. And as that was the only indicator of hierarchy and relationships there was to start with, there’s now no organization left at all. Many screens are just a bunch of words, all imperceptibly different shades of dark gray, strewn out randomly over a solid white background. To make things worse, they all seem to be implemented in slightly inconsistent ways (you can tell when an h1 is wrapped in ten (10) layers of nested divs, each just containing the next div) so things that should align are all off by a pixel and have slightly different behaviors.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Whitespace is good and functional in some contexts but it's detrimental in others. Imagine an Excel sheet with only 10 rows per screen, light gray text and no borders around cells. And yet this is the reality of many lists on many modern web sites. Less than 10 items per page when I could easily read 30 or 40 of them at once instead of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
  - pbourke 6y ago
    And often scrolling with auto load, so you never really know how far you are from the bottom of the list.
    - prepend 6y ago
      Thank God for “download CSV.” I think it’s funny that I feel like some sites are just captchas to find the link to pull down the data into excel. I wonder if people like this stuff? I mean are there people who mindlessly scroll through this crap and like it?
  - mustardo 6y ago
    Vanguard's new website is like this :-( used to be a medium dense table easy to compare records now on my 27" 4k monitor i can see only a handfull and its scroll city :-( https://www.vanguard.com.au/personal/products/en/overview https://www.vanguard.com.au/personal/products/en/overview
matthewmacleod 6y ago
I'm normally not on the hate bandwagon for this sort of thing but the Jira UI has deteriorated to the point where it's an actual impediment to getting work done. In the future, when cursing the developers who are responsible for this, I'll bear in mind that sometimes no matter how good the individuals in the team… it's sometimes impossible to salvage a good product.
munchkinship 6y ago
Good to finally hear from the inside what everyone on the outside sees. It's a shame they are killing off the server products to push everyone into the cloud.
manquer 6y ago
I think there is case for making and selling and alternative UI for Jira. as long handle being wholly dependent on a third party whose API access could be pulled anytime .
- novok 6y ago
  They do exist! https://getbodo.com/ https://getbodo.com/
  - eli 6y ago
    “Sales have been halted until further notice.” Hmmmmm
- Aeolun 6y ago
  API for Jira Server is not going anywhere. Of course the product itself will cease to exist in a little while, but most places where Jira is terrible are on datacenter anyway.
divbzero 6y ago
Kudos for at least trying. For one large web app I worked on, we had a setup where browser loading time would always print out in the dev tools console. We had no hard requirement for UI changes to stay under a certain threshold, but seeing that loading time with every refresh during development was enough to keep us mindful of payload.
Rillen 6y ago
I actually created a support ticket and also talked to someone in Atlassian through some user experience lab thing. I didn't comprehend how someone thought it would be a good idea to move the button for a new ticket away from the main screen to that sidebar thing where it took an additional click to do so. Yes lets add another click to the most used function in my workflow...
odiroot 6y ago
> insane whitespace THANK YOU (sorry for shouting). That's my biggest pet peeve with the new UI. I feel like I'm using some mix of Mac OS X UI and a child's toy. Everything is so big and spread out, there's barely even space for longer text areas. Don't even think about putting windows side-by-side with JIRA taking half a screen, it's unusable.
WinstonSmith84 6y ago
If it can comfort you, there are software which are a lot more worse than Jira (check out HP ALM :-) )
SkyPuncher 6y ago
For what it's worth, I think a lot of people put misplaced blame on Jira for their own broken process. Jira is a tractor trailer. It's big, it's powerful, it's a bit slow to get moving, but (1) it can carry just about anything (2) once it gets moving, it tends to stay moving. There's a lot of value in having a "do it all" project management system. That being said, there's also value in alternatives that are more tailored towards specific needs.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  Have you tried the alternatives like YouTrack? Way faster, way better design and the searchbar was amazing.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  We were avoiding creating issues because of how long it would take to do with JIRA. I had to stop and wait between sentences because the JIRA edit box couldn't keep up with my typing.
eecc 6y ago
I gave up on JIRA-1330. Look, Atlassian is a growth-by-acquisition operation, chaos is inevitable
deckard1 6y ago
> the inane choice to use RxJS despite literally no valid use cases We did the same at one company I worked for. It was a terrible decision. RxJS is one of those things that is fun to play with until you look down and it's cutting off your legs before you even felt it. Instead of simple AJAX calls when needed in places that are logical, your app turns into this hydra of events flowing everywhere and never knowing why anything is happening or where it's happening. RxJS is what happens when a Jenga tower makes love with a Rube Goldberg machine. And don't get me started on those damn marbles. We're writing goddamn CRUD webapps!!! We don't need marble diagrams for this. It's like that Mitch Hedberg joke about donut receipts. We don't need to introduce complexity into our simple life.
- saurik 6y ago
  Isn't the idea that if you edit something I'm looking at it would be nice if my view could automatically update? (FWIW, I would totally accept that I don't need that on a bug tracker and I probably am actually happier without it, but I can at least see the premise being interesting... being able to see point changes or user votes or comments as they happen; I do appreciate the extent to which GitHub's issue tracker automatically updates).
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Might be missing something, but how is this related? Is the assumption that this is what RxJS gives you? Because I mean...that's a websocket. And how you model the event, and handle it...is up to you. Don't need any library to help you unless you want one.
  - larrik 6y ago
    As a heavy Jira user, I absolutely want my screen to update when someone else updates a ticket. That doesn't actually happen, though.
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  >>> is what happens when a Jenga tower makes love with a Rube Goldberg machine. And the Award for Metaphor of the week goes to ...
nicoburns 6y ago
If you have a say in things then try to get your company to switch to Clubhouse. It's everything JIRA should be and it's blazing fast. I appreciate your expanation of th Atlassian dev process. I've always wondered how they managed to make JIRA so slow.
- scaryclam 6y ago
  Having used clubhouse extensively, I'd say the absolute opposite. It's missing basic features, reporting is a joke and while the trelloesque usability is nice that's the only thing really going for it. It's also more expensive than Jira, which is completely bananas.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    I guess it depends on your use case. We're a small company: it has all the features we need and we're on the free plan.
TranquilMarmot 6y ago
> One cool thing, though, is that these components are open source Except going to https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit/src/master https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit/src/master tells you to go to https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit-mk-2/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit-mk-2/src/master/ which then tells you: > Unfortunately, that code no longer resides here as it’s all been moved to a new closed source location.
- chii 6y ago
  in case you want to view the repo, it's linked in the https://atlaskit.atlassian.com/ https://atlaskit.atlassian.com/ (menu -> resources). The breadcrumb to get to it is a bit crazy, but https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/design-system-mirror/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/design-system-mirror/src/mas... is the old mirror, which has a link in the readme to the new mirror: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlassian-frontend-mirror/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlassian-frontend-mirror/sr...
Aeolun 6y ago
Wait, so you are telling me that the unuseable UI I’m currently using on server, is actually the better of the two? That’s scary in a few ways I have a hard time imagining.
- arvindamirtaa 6y ago
  The horror

by mdoms 6y ago

stevoski 6y ago

This is fascinating to hear. Sometimes with Jira updates, I have to ask myself “What WERE they thinking?” It’s good to hear that actually some people (well, at least one!) inside the org ask this too.

threeseed 6y ago

> I pushed hard to get the powers that be to focus more on performance and payload If I was in Atlassian's situation this would be the last thing to focus on. a) This is the biggest ever rewrite of their most important products. In this situation maintaining feature set compatibility is always going to be priority A, B to Z. b) Their paying customers are mostly in the enterprise space who have very fast internet and stable environments i.e. payloads are quickly cached.

taurath 6y ago
The key is jira and most atlassian products are feature mountains to be sold to upper management, but I can think of no end-user person that likes to deal with it on a daily basis. Then someone in the vein of slack or Asana comes around and eats atlassians lunch because they’ve neglected making the product good for anyone other than executives.
- threeseed 6y ago
  1) End users are not the buyer. It's the Head of Delivery, Iteration Managers, Agile Consultants etc that are. For them JIRA is great because it's heavily customisable and scales across the enterprise. It's actually quite hard to balance this with a great end user experience. 2) They are in the middle of a complete UI rewrite and I've only briefly used it but it's definitely much better than the previous versions. I imagine the Trello acquisition is also going to help them here.
- chrisandchris 6y ago
  I actually use Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence (all Server versiob) in a small team (maybe 5 people) and I really enjoy it. It‘s good in what it does, it does the things you want it to do and the 3 tools are good integrated. For my other team members, they enjoy Confluence more than Jira, because Jira feels a bit difficult.
Waterluvian 6y ago
Well, they have succeeded in turning my entire team off JIRA. We basically don't use it anymore, mostly because their A B Z priorities didn't include making it not feel painful to use.
- codyb 6y ago
  It's crazy to me when I can't type in JIRA... or when I drag a ticket to a new column, and it just doesn't go, and I reload and it's still in the old column. Or when I try to click a ticket and it just doesn't open. The not being able to type fluidly has to be the worst though. Our team has as well at least brought up the idea of potentially trying other products. Some of it's probably me not really wanting to get involved with JIRA in the first place (who wants to manage tickets), but in the interest of being a better employee I've been trying to make sure I'm squaring out my work properly for tracking, etc. And there's certain things, that I'm sure are there, but I just can't find sometimes. Like... how to add an epic easily. There's at least three different views for each ticket (when you create it, when you click it open into the modal, and the full screen view), and things are apparently in different places on those different views? I'll take some of the blame, but it's a mess.

wmichelin 6y ago

I do enjoy the new Jira UI a lot more than the old one, but yes it is definitely slower and is missing some key features (hotkeys for editing specific ticket fields please!). Things have been improved with the recent addition of pinned ticket fields, but they still have a long way to go.

disgrunt 6y ago

These JIRA UI updates are also an accessibility nightmare.

trhway 6y ago

>whose main design goals were to bring commonality across all Atlassian products. This is a worthwhile goal the issue here isn't the goal itself, it is that such highly visible efforts - "common platform", "common UI", etc. which are very complex technically to do right - invariably bring up to the top and into the deciding positions those "drivers of cross-organizational/functional/etc. change" style people whom you'd really want to be staying far from such important and complex technical issues... I worked with Jira in 2012-13, it was appallingly slow. Making it even slower is an achievement.

tobr 6y ago

> insane whitespace Good to hear that there’s at least one person involved with it that sees the problem with this. I imagine how the use of whitespace to organize the layout probably looked very simple and attractive in Sketch or Figma at some point. Then reality crept in, and that whitespace was gradually carved up into more and more incoherent pieces. And as that was the only indicator of hierarchy and relationships there was to start with, there’s now no organization left at all. Many screens are just a bunch of words, all imperceptibly different shades of dark gray, strewn out randomly over a solid white background. To make things worse, they all seem to be implemented in slightly inconsistent ways (you can tell when an h1 is wrapped in ten (10) layers of nested divs, each just containing the next div) so things that should align are all off by a pixel and have slightly different behaviors.

pmontra 6y ago
Whitespace is good and functional in some contexts but it's detrimental in others. Imagine an Excel sheet with only 10 rows per screen, light gray text and no borders around cells. And yet this is the reality of many lists on many modern web sites. Less than 10 items per page when I could easily read 30 or 40 of them at once instead of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
- pbourke 6y ago
  And often scrolling with auto load, so you never really know how far you are from the bottom of the list.
  - prepend 6y ago
    Thank God for “download CSV.” I think it’s funny that I feel like some sites are just captchas to find the link to pull down the data into excel. I wonder if people like this stuff? I mean are there people who mindlessly scroll through this crap and like it?
- mustardo 6y ago
  Vanguard's new website is like this :-( used to be a medium dense table easy to compare records now on my 27" 4k monitor i can see only a handfull and its scroll city :-( https://www.vanguard.com.au/personal/products/en/overview https://www.vanguard.com.au/personal/products/en/overview

matthewmacleod 6y ago

I'm normally not on the hate bandwagon for this sort of thing but the Jira UI has deteriorated to the point where it's an actual impediment to getting work done. In the future, when cursing the developers who are responsible for this, I'll bear in mind that sometimes no matter how good the individuals in the team… it's sometimes impossible to salvage a good product.

munchkinship 6y ago

Good to finally hear from the inside what everyone on the outside sees. It's a shame they are killing off the server products to push everyone into the cloud.

manquer 6y ago

I think there is case for making and selling and alternative UI for Jira. as long handle being wholly dependent on a third party whose API access could be pulled anytime .

novok 6y ago
They do exist! https://getbodo.com/ https://getbodo.com/
- eli 6y ago
  “Sales have been halted until further notice.” Hmmmmm
Aeolun 6y ago
API for Jira Server is not going anywhere. Of course the product itself will cease to exist in a little while, but most places where Jira is terrible are on datacenter anyway.

divbzero 6y ago

Kudos for at least trying. For one large web app I worked on, we had a setup where browser loading time would always print out in the dev tools console. We had no hard requirement for UI changes to stay under a certain threshold, but seeing that loading time with every refresh during development was enough to keep us mindful of payload.

Rillen 6y ago

I actually created a support ticket and also talked to someone in Atlassian through some user experience lab thing. I didn't comprehend how someone thought it would be a good idea to move the button for a new ticket away from the main screen to that sidebar thing where it took an additional click to do so. Yes lets add another click to the most used function in my workflow...

odiroot 6y ago

> insane whitespace THANK YOU (sorry for shouting). That's my biggest pet peeve with the new UI. I feel like I'm using some mix of Mac OS X UI and a child's toy. Everything is so big and spread out, there's barely even space for longer text areas. Don't even think about putting windows side-by-side with JIRA taking half a screen, it's unusable.

WinstonSmith84 6y ago

If it can comfort you, there are software which are a lot more worse than Jira (check out HP ALM :-) )

SkyPuncher 6y ago

For what it's worth, I think a lot of people put misplaced blame on Jira for their own broken process. Jira is a tractor trailer. It's big, it's powerful, it's a bit slow to get moving, but (1) it can carry just about anything (2) once it gets moving, it tends to stay moving. There's a lot of value in having a "do it all" project management system. That being said, there's also value in alternatives that are more tailored towards specific needs.

danielscrubs 6y ago
Have you tried the alternatives like YouTrack? Way faster, way better design and the searchbar was amazing.
nicoburns 6y ago
We were avoiding creating issues because of how long it would take to do with JIRA. I had to stop and wait between sentences because the JIRA edit box couldn't keep up with my typing.

eecc 6y ago

I gave up on JIRA-1330. Look, Atlassian is a growth-by-acquisition operation, chaos is inevitable

deckard1 6y ago

> the inane choice to use RxJS despite literally no valid use cases We did the same at one company I worked for. It was a terrible decision. RxJS is one of those things that is fun to play with until you look down and it's cutting off your legs before you even felt it. Instead of simple AJAX calls when needed in places that are logical, your app turns into this hydra of events flowing everywhere and never knowing why anything is happening or where it's happening. RxJS is what happens when a Jenga tower makes love with a Rube Goldberg machine. And don't get me started on those damn marbles. We're writing goddamn CRUD webapps!!! We don't need marble diagrams for this. It's like that Mitch Hedberg joke about donut receipts. We don't need to introduce complexity into our simple life.

saurik 6y ago
Isn't the idea that if you edit something I'm looking at it would be nice if my view could automatically update? (FWIW, I would totally accept that I don't need that on a bug tracker and I probably am actually happier without it, but I can at least see the premise being interesting... being able to see point changes or user votes or comments as they happen; I do appreciate the extent to which GitHub's issue tracker automatically updates).
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Might be missing something, but how is this related? Is the assumption that this is what RxJS gives you? Because I mean...that's a websocket. And how you model the event, and handle it...is up to you. Don't need any library to help you unless you want one.
- larrik 6y ago
  As a heavy Jira user, I absolutely want my screen to update when someone else updates a ticket. That doesn't actually happen, though.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
>>> is what happens when a Jenga tower makes love with a Rube Goldberg machine. And the Award for Metaphor of the week goes to ...

nicoburns 6y ago

If you have a say in things then try to get your company to switch to Clubhouse. It's everything JIRA should be and it's blazing fast. I appreciate your expanation of th Atlassian dev process. I've always wondered how they managed to make JIRA so slow.

scaryclam 6y ago
Having used clubhouse extensively, I'd say the absolute opposite. It's missing basic features, reporting is a joke and while the trelloesque usability is nice that's the only thing really going for it. It's also more expensive than Jira, which is completely bananas.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  I guess it depends on your use case. We're a small company: it has all the features we need and we're on the free plan.

TranquilMarmot 6y ago

> One cool thing, though, is that these components are open source Except going to https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit/src/master https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit/src/master tells you to go to https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit-mk-2/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit-mk-2/src/master/ which then tells you: > Unfortunately, that code no longer resides here as it’s all been moved to a new closed source location.

chii 6y ago
in case you want to view the repo, it's linked in the https://atlaskit.atlassian.com/ https://atlaskit.atlassian.com/ (menu -> resources). The breadcrumb to get to it is a bit crazy, but https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/design-system-mirror/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/design-system-mirror/src/mas... is the old mirror, which has a link in the readme to the new mirror: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlassian-frontend-mirror/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlassian-frontend-mirror/sr...

Aeolun 6y ago

Wait, so you are telling me that the unuseable UI I’m currently using on server, is actually the better of the two? That’s scary in a few ways I have a hard time imagining.

arvindamirtaa 6y ago
The horror