Getting Started with Jira's New Navigation

1. Getting Started with Jira's New Navigation: Hello, and welcome to this class all about getting started with Jira's new navigation. My name is Dan Lefeb and for well over a decade, I've helped teams around the world use Jira for their Agile project management. In June of 2025, at last, he made some major changes to Jira's interface that includes changing the term issues to be called work. Now, that's something that haven't changed since 2002. In this class, we'll be taking just a few moments to get an overview of where everything is located in the new interface so you can get up and running as fast as possible without any flu. So let's hop into Jira and get started. Now, right away, the very first place that we'll go is this for U page, which is also some new terminology because it used to be called the your Work page. In fact, it's so new that there are still places that we'll see it being called your Work. So just know that as far as Jira is concerned, the FU page and your W page are the same place. But in here, we can see all the different things that we've worked on. Assuming, of course, we've actually worked on something. As we can see, it looks like the very first time we logged into Jira, and that's why there's not a lot right now because we're just getting started. If I were to pull over another window where we can see the your work page as logged in as my global Jira administrator, you can see, there's a lot more work. Right? Because I've actually worked on a lot more than with this user account, this is the first time we're logging in. Now, if you're used to an older version of Jira, the main navigation was up at the top and now the main navigation has been shifted to the sidebar, which we can expand or collapse using this icon at the top. And if we hover over it, we can see the keyboard shortcut is the open bracket. I would highly recommend getting used to using that keyboard shortcut to expand and collapse the sidebar. Now we'll come back to these features in the side bar. But up here next to the side bar, we have these four dots. These dots are called the app switcher because they let us switch between any of the Atlassian apps that we have access to. For example, you can see, I have a license to Confluence. That is Atlassian's Wiki documentation tool. Now, confluence is outside the scope of what we're learning about in Jira today because confluence is its own separate app. But I want to point this out because if you have access to multiple Jira installations, actually, let me pull over my Jira administrator account. Because if I come into the app switcher here, we can see I actually have multiple Jira instances that I have access to with this account. I'm not going to be able to go in there for the privacy of my consulting clients, but I do want to point out that if you have additional Jira instances, you'll have access to them up here in the app switcher. Next to the app switcher is your company's logo, which takes us back to our home. Now, in this case, it is the your work page that we're on when we log in by default for the first time. I know this is pretty straightforward, but you'll notice that this is not the Jira logo. It's my company's logo. I specifically wanted to change that because every single company or client I've ever worked with, one of the very first things the Jira administrator does is to change the logo from the Jira logo to their company logo. The chances are very good that this will be one of the things that will look different on your side because if your Jira administrator has customized this to add your company's logo, obviously won't be the same as my company's logo. Moving along now, next to the customizable company icon, we have the search. Searching is something you'll be doing a lot in Jira in your day to day. You'll save a lot of time by learning the keyboard shortcut, which we can see here is the forward slash. This is a global search across all of your work items in Jira. Another global keyboard shortcut that you want to keep in mind is C for Create, which is also what we'll find that this Create button at the top does. Anytime that we're working in Jira, if we want to create a new work item, just tap C and that will let us create that work item. The last few icons here on the right side of Jira's menu at the top are a little more straightforward. First, are the notifications. There's not a lot in here right now because we haven't gotten any notifications yet. But as we're working inside of Jira, we're going to start to see notifications pop up. You'll probably see those on your side when somebody comments on an issue that you're watching, somebody tags your user name somewhere in Jira, things like that. Just like we're all familiar with when it comes to notifications, here in Jira, it's just a quick way to hop to the work items that those notifications come from. And then there's the Help icon. Again, it's another simple icon that's straightforward. But I want to point this out because if at any point as you're working in Jira, if something just doesn't make sense, I would encourage you to make use of this. Of course, you can ask your company to hire me to help your team too. But quite honestly, the fastest way for you to figure things out is through Atlassian's extremely detailed and incredibly helpful documentation because that can answer just about any question that you have. And if it doesn't Atlassian's support team is amazing. Even though I am not associated with Atlassian at all, I have interacted with their support team a lot over the years and they've been really helpful to either fix a problem or even just be someone to bounce ideas off of for the best practices on how to set up and organize ira. Next to help is our settings. Now, the key thing to keep in mind with our settings is what you see in this menu is directly tied to the permission that you have. For example, right now, I'm logged in as a user without any administrative permission, so we don't see very much in here. But if I pull back my global administrator and look at the settings, we're going to have a lot more settings in here as a global administrator because we have elevated permissions. But just know that the settings that you have here are directly tied to your user permissions. And then next to the settings gear, we have a few more personal settings, so all the more clear cut things related to our account, the profile picture, our password. If you're like me and you prefer dark mode, we can switch into Jira's dark mode here. Then in here actually is where we can customize the Jira homepage that we talked about at the start of this video. If you come into our account settings and come to more the product settings, into the Jira settings, we can see the Jira homepage and we can change this if we want to do that right in here. Now I'm going to leave this at the default of your work. One more thing just as a quick note, this is called product settings, but as of this recording, Atlassian has announced that they're going to start calling them apps instead of products. As I mentioned before with the app switcher switching between the different apps. There's a little mixed match in the terminology there. So if you see this say app settings, instead of product settings on your side, that's probably going to be updated soon. That's just a change in terminology to be aware of. Now, the first thing I want to point out with this sidebar itself is if you're using Jira on a mobile device, it will default to the responsive design where the sidebars collapsed by default. If I were to make this browser winder smaller, you can see, there's no way to really pin this. If I start working in Jira then, it's going to automatically collapse as opposed to if I'm on a desktop for you and have a bigger browser, you can see the sidebar automatically pins. Now, we already learned how to expand and collapse that, so it's not really a big deal. I just want to point that out because as of this recording, there's not really a way to pin the sidebar open in the responsive design. And before we get to an overview of ETGs features, I want to point out this customization down here at the bottom because if the sidebar looks different on your side, then maybe it's been customized from the default. Here is where you can hide or show these different features or rearrange them however you'd like. Okay, so let's hop back to the top here of this menu. This is the for menu item. It takes you actually to the your work page, as we saw when we changed the default we can do that. It's called your work. Historically, it's been called your work. If we look at the URL and the actual browser here, you can see it's called your work. But there have been some terminology changes and so I would expect at some point it'll change for you. That seems to be the new name for this page. Beneath that, we have quick access to any work that we've updated or worked on recently. This goes beyond just work items themselves to include things like agile boards or projects. Then down here at the bottom, we can open this up outside of this menu. This is just a consistent thing across most of these menu items that we'll see, the ability to open this up in its own page. Under recent we have SRD. These are start items. Basically, this is Jira's bookmarks or favorite system. But in a nutshell, anytime we star work items across Jira, it's going to show up here for quick access. Moving on to the apps, there's a lot of functionality that you can add onto Jira through apps that you purchase in the Atlassian marketplace with purchase being the keyword there because a lot of these apps are paid add ons that extend the capability of Jira. Moving along. Here, we can see a list of all the different projects that we've opened recently, which we can see. Again, there's really nothing that we've opened up recently. This is a brand new account, but we can also view all the projects that we have access to in here as well. Next, we have our filters. Now, in a nutshell, filters are saved searches. Like projects, you can star your favorite filter for quick access here. If we want to add this to Start, it'll show up in the star section up there. Next we have our dashboard. As the name implies, dashboards can be a quick way to access things that you're working on or build charts that can help with reporting. We can see the default dashboard here just has some simple things that are set up by the Jira administrator. But we can see now that we've opened this up, it shows up in the recent dashboards. That's an example of how this sidebar will update with the recent things that you've been to just as a quick way of being able to get back there very fast. Moving along with the sidebar over here next to the dashboards, we have teams. This is another of those terms that Jira is using probably a little bit differently than you might think because it has nothing to do with Microsoft Teams or anything like that. A great way to think of teams is the four page for a team of people. A team can have customized reference links, a stream of activity for any of the users on the team and so on. If that sounds too abstract, I would encourage you to hop in here on your side in your Jira instance and see if your organization has any teams already set up. But I just want to highlight this ability to invite people into Jira. Because in my experience, this is something that a lot of new users expect to be a way to add someone that they want into Jira and it is, but only. Now, if you're not a Jira administrator because right now we're not logged in as a Jira administrator. When you try to add someone here, it's going to send a request to your Jira administrator. It's not going to add them right away. The reason for that is because Atlassian bills your company based on how many users there are actively using Atlassian's apps. So adding people to Jira will change that bill. And so that's why it's something that your Jira administrator will need to do. When we're logged in as a user, it's just going to send a notification to the Jira administrator saying, Hey, I'd like to add this person in. Can you do that, please? They would have to accept that. Then last but certainly not least over here on the side bar, we have the goals, and we can see this is going to take us outside of Jira. Now if Jira is just one of the apps created by the company called Atlassian. Goals actually live outside of Jira in a place called Atlassian Home. There are a way of tracking well, goals across Jira and other Atlassian apps. With that, we've gotten a good overview of the new user interface here in Jira. Now, obviously, there's a ton more depth that we can cover to dig into each one of these features that we've looked at, and by all means, if you would like to see a longer more in depth class, covering all of those or any of Jira's powerful features, let me know. Until then, thanks for watching this getting started with Jira's new navigation class.