Introducing Atlassian’s new navigation

At Atlassian, our mission is to unleash the potential of every team. We know that seamless navigation – both across our product suite and within each individual product – is key to keeping work moving. Whether you’re switching between projects, tracking progress, or collaborating with your team, finding what you need quickly is essential. That’s why we’ve taken a fresh approach to navigation, making it more intuitive, flexible, and built to scale with your team’s needs.

What’s changing?

Our new navigation is designed with flexibility and ease of use at its core. It simplifies how you move through our products while giving you more control to customize the experience to your needs. With a design that feels familiar to anyone who uses modern software, we’re creating a navigation experience that will eventually unify all Atlassian products, ensuring a seamless experience no matter where you work.

A simplified top navigation

Keeping the focus on essential tasks like search and create, we’ve decluttered the top navigation to give you easy access to utility items like notifications, settings, and your profile. With the focus on search, locating work items, pages, and projects is easier no matter where you are.

A customizable sidebar

The streamlined left sidebar reduces clutter and surfaces the most critical navigation items, which you can personalize according to your preferences. Need more space? Simply resize or collapse it for a more streamlined experience.

A modern, scalable design

The new navigation embraces Atlassian’s refreshed color scales, iconography, and typography, delivering a cleaner, more modern experience that enhances readability, accessibility, and scalability. But we’re not just focused on today – we’re building for the future. Designed to evolve alongside your workflows, the new navigation remains intuitive and effortless, no matter how your team grows or changes.

Where you’ll see these changes

We’re thrilled to announce that our rollout for Jira, Jira Service Management, Jira Product Discovery, Atlassian Home, and Confluence starts today. Explore the reimagined navigation in each product:

Jira, Jira Service Management, and Jira Product Discovery

See Jira’s fresh look and navigation.

Atlassian Home

Explore Atlassian Home’s new navigation.

Confluence

See Confluence’s new navigation.

How it started

Learnings from the past

Some of you may remember that we gave the navigation a makeover back in 2018. At that time, we took a one-size-fits-all approach, applying the same navigation across all our products.

However, we soon realized that what worked for one product didn’t always work for another. As our products evolved, they did so independently, leading to a navigation experience that felt disjointed across tools.

Fast forward to today – we’ve listened to your feedback and are approaching navigation with a fresh perspective.

What did we learn from our first attempt? Consistency doesn’t mean everything has to be identical. Instead, it’s about finding the right balance between familiarity and flexibility – giving each product the navigation it needs while ensuring a seamless experience across the Atlassian suite.

How it’s going

Building with user feedback at its core

Our users were at the heart of this redesign. To ensure the new navigation truly meets your needs, we took an iterative approach, gathering insights at every stage and refining the experience based on real-world feedback. Over the past year, Atlassian’s navigation team has been working to push the boundaries of customization and ease of use, bringing powerful improvements to life.

Early insights and internal testing

We introduced a Chrome extension to 160 users, allowing them to test early versions of the navigation in real-world scenarios. This enabled us to observe how they interacted with the changes and gather valuable insights. We followed up with ease-of-use testing and in-depth interviews, which highlighted a key focus area: customization. Users wanted more flexibility to tailor their experience, ensuring our products fit their unique workflows and preferences.

The Chrome extension experiment validated our instincts, giving us the data and confidence to move forward with even more real-world testing.

In mid-2024, we introduced the new navigation to our toughest critics, our own Atlassians. This internal rollout allowed us to validate core functionality, uncover critical issues, and refine the experience before expanding to external users. By putting the navigation through real-world use within our teams, we gained invaluable feedback that helped us fine-tune every detail and ensure a smoother transition for our customers.

Early Access Program (EAP)

By October 2024, we were ready to launch an Early Access Program, inviting a select group of 100 customer sites (>30k monthly active users) and 30 developer sites to try out the new navigation. We opened sign-ups to all customers and handpicked some of the most engaged Jira and Confluence users based on factors like tenure, product co-usage, edition, and impact on apps and integrations.

How did we know customers liked the new navigation? An opt-out rate of just 2.7%, core task usage trending positively, and increased interactions with navigation elements.

Beta Launch

With opt-out rates holding steady below 3% and no unexpected negative feedback, we were ready to scale testing to more customers. For the Beta release, we removed all acceptance restrictions, allowing anyone to opt in and experience the new navigation firsthand. We also rolled it out by default for all new and free users.

And the results? In just two months, over 1,500 sites and 485,000 monthly active users joined the Beta, with a low opt-out rate of 2.6%. Customers were navigating faster, engaging more frequently, and reinforcing what our data already suggested: these navigation improvements were making our products more intuitive and usable.

With these strong early signals, we’re confident in our approach and ready to make the new navigation available to millions of users with General Availability (GA).

General availability is here!

With increased active usage across multiple products and overwhelmingly positive user sentiment from both the EAP and Beta phases, we’re accelerating our rollout strategy to efficiently bring the new navigation to all customers.

With strong adoption and positive feedback, we’re accelerating our rollout strategy to efficiently bring the new navigation to all customers. Starting March 17, 2025, we’ll begin a phased rollout over the next few months for Standard, Premium, and Enterprise editions.

A special note for admins

We know that change can be challenging, and introducing new changes to your team needs planning. So to ensure you and your team are comfortable with the new navigation, we’re giving admins additional flexibility:

• Try it first: Admins can enable the new navigation only for themselves before rolling it out to all users on the site.
• Sandbox testing: Admins can now self-serve and turn the new navigation on for Sandbox environments, allowing teams to preview changes in a test setting before full adoption.

Stay connected

Change is a journey, and we want to make sure you have the resources and support you need.

Join our focus group to get updates, ask questions, share feedback, and connect with the team behind the new navigation.

Read more about how we’re rolling out, and stay updated on Cloud Roadmap for the timeframes and status.

Your feedback has shaped this experience, and we’re excited to continue learning from you as we roll out the new navigation. Thank you for being part of this journey!