Project Management Tool

JIRA

Desktop app

Jira is a project management tool used by millions around the world to plan, track, release, report or build software product maps. Navigation within the tool is the most important to feature to users so they navigate through the system without getting lost.

Techniques

Lean UX, wireframing, high-fidelity prototyping, and usability testing

Roles

Ideation, UX Researcher, Interviewer, UX Designer, UI Designer

Tools

Pen and paper: Sketching
Whiteboard, Omnigraffle: Process Flow
Sketch App: UX/UI Design
Invision App: Rapid Prototyping

Insights & Discovery

Problem Statement

How can we find a new way to design the current structure of navigation in order to unleash the potential of the tool?

Discovery

Jira was growing not only with new users but also with new features and accesibility of these new features causing major usability problems.

Research

With the involvement of marketing department, we analysed background analytics and do some on-site interview and testing with key users to understand the problem in depth. We found out that users are struggling to find these new features and the top menu navigation doesn’t meet the standards.

Research & Evolution

Defining the personas

To create a premium experience for all users, we had to decide key user personas that get benefit from the tool. From the research that we’ve conducted we set our key user personas as kanban users, scrum users and next-gen users.

Finding the convenient solution

With the help of analytics data and user feedbacks that are received before we conducted design thinking workshops in order to list and prioritize frequently used features of the tool and identify the pain-points.

User research

To create a tool that satisfies all personas need, in addition to our workshop, we performed various numbers of interviews and surveys with the users around the world to create unique experience to each different persona while trying to maintain consistency within the journey.

Strategy

Purpose of the navigation

From the researches and feedbacks, we defined the strategy and goal of the navigation:

– Even though updating the content of the top navigation all the time is not convenient, frequently used features should be visible to users all the time
– Top menu drawer is not only time consuming for users but also occupies huge amount of space over dashboard, therefore new navigation should be located in natural place and include quick action buttons.
– User should have flexibility of customisation and visibility over navigation.

Sketching ideas

It was very important to create sketches of the navigation for optimum UX solution. With sketch workshops, we discovered the revolutionary left menu idea.

Challenges

Content structure

With new left menu idea, a new way of information structure was needed in order to create convenient and user friendly navigation experience. Therefore, with design thinking workshops that are conducted with cross functional departments and stakeholders, we created a new detailed information structure and journey maps.

Designing with new ADS

Wire-framing is done with new design system that were under development. It was pretty tricky and challenging to use new components while being updated regularly. With good communication and time management, we designed various numbers of ideas.

New interface

Left menu

Essential elements like notifications, help, profile, search and settings are kept in navigation and plus module is added to create flexible navigation experience to users in order to create shortcuts frequently used features.

Inner left menu alternatives

Everything that were in the top menu as labels are structured as tree so users can navigate through from only panel without getting lost in navigation. Frequently used features are placed to create consistency.

Sprint page with new left menu

With the new and tidy left menu approach, users can able to focus on dashboard and observe where they are in the system without an effort.