Jira
Prototyping improvements to an established platform
Before getting started on the details of the project, here’s a little information about the company…
Jira is an Atlassian project management tool established to help organizations create and track projects across teams. Jira allows teams to streamline projects by documenting progress, assigning work, monitoring progress, and tracking the status of a project. To assess how well the tool works for developers, evaluations were conducted to get a better understanding of the usability of the tool and mental model of the users. Information gathered from the evaluations was implemented into meaningful changes to the application via an interactive prototype.
The Challenge
Prototype improvements to Jira’s website
My Role
Served as UX Researcher and UX Designer - supported by a team of UX researchers during evaluation and contextual inquiry phases
Cognitive Walkthrough
Primary User Research Protocol
Contextual Inquiry Protocol
Contextual Inquiry
Findings & Prototype Plan
User Stories
Interactive Prototype
Interactive Prototype Video Walkthrough
The Context
How it started…
Jira is a widely used tool for software, marketing, design, product, and product management teams. Jira’s function is to plan and track work across every team from complex projects to daily tasks. However, - much like any tool - it may not function to the extent of how it’s intended to function or there may be aspects of its functionality that are not helpful to the ones using it. So, we decided to put it to the test and see what a primary set of users had to say about it.
So who uses Jira that’s gonna tell all about the ins and outs?
For purposes of this project, two developers provided insight and feedback on how they use Jira in their roles. As expected, there were positives of using Jira, and there were also pain points that created frustration.
Here’s what occurred…
As non-users of Jira, it was important for the team to understand if the order of the cues in the system aligned with what a user would anticipate as a next step. This is important as a means to evaluate if Jira has relative ease-of-use for someone with no training. To assess this, a cognitive walkthrough was conducted in collaboration with two other researchers.
“Things are contradictory in Jira in tickets. “This is frustrating.””
Cognitive Walkthrough Snapshot
After the team had an idea of the ease-of-use of the tool, the next step was to better understand how an actual Jira user navigated the platform. In order to best determine this, a contextual inquiry was conducted with an IOS developer and was guided by the primary user research protocol. During this 60 minute virtual session, the participant walked through how they used Jira, pointed out what aspects of the product were important to their daily work, and outlined pain points. To further understand how users navigate Jira, a second participant known to the researcher to use Jira was interviewed. The user provided additional information on aspects of Jira that were important to their work, and identified pain points.
Team Contextual Inquiry
The Findings
What we found…
Across both participants, Jira was described as being necessary and customizable, yet slow as a tool. One participant stated they use Jira for bigger projects, but if there’s a way to use another software (i.e., Notion), that is less “cumbersome,” they will. The messages section within an “issue or ticket” was a commonly used area of work and overall theme. This section is an area where individuals who are working on the ticket put their corrections and any steps they took to help resolve the issue/ticket. Feedback from participants indicated the following about this section:
there is no way to search within the messages section
there is no indicator of how many messages are in a ticket/issue
if there are several individuals working on a ticket, the messages can get to be a lot
Why is this a problem?
As a tool that is already being described as slow, the above factors would make it difficult for individuals to sort through an abundance of messages. This violates Nielsen’s heuristic of minimalist design. In addition, there is no number indicator to see how many messages there are within a ticket, and this violates Nielsen’s heuristic of match between system and the real world.
To help synthesize the data, a research findings and prototype plan was generated to begin to understand what changes could be made to address the pain points. User stories were included to understand what the user’s goals were and how they would be achieved along with a detailed scenario to put it into perspective.
User Story 1
As a developer, I want to be able to sort through some comments so it's easier to scroll down and view other comments.
User Story 2
As a developer, I want to be able to search for key words in the comment section so I don’t have to sort through irrelevant comments.
User Story 3
As a developer, I want to know relatively how much has been done on a ticket by looking at it.
Scenario:
A developer created a ticket that needs to be worked on for a week-long sprint, which is half the amount of time you’d normally get on a sprint. Therefore, you need to be able to assign yourself a ticket and get started on it right away. There are also other developers working on the same ticket you are. In order to see the progress on a ticket, you want to view the number of messages on the ticket as this is an indicator if others have started addressing the issue. You can do this by seeing the # of comments at the top of the comment section. In order to read through the most important comments in the section, you can collapse irrelevant comments to make the important comments more visible with less clutter.
The Design
How the design changed…
To put the user stories and scenarios into visuals, a low-fidelity sketch was generated to visualize an option for how the screen would flow, and what the interface might look like with added changes. Figma was then utilized to create high fidelity prototypes.
What was added to Jira?
To address the issue of sorting through messages, two features were added to the ticket/issue in the message section. The first feature was a search bar to allow key words or phrases to be searched so it would take users to the desired content immediately. The second feature added was a collapsable message option to provide greater control to the user so they could collapse messages as they choose. This allows users to collapse messages that may be irrelevant, not needed at certain times, or longer messages that take up a lot of room, to then only have relevant
Low-Fidelity Sketch
Figma Prototypes
Original ticket prior to changes
Changes implemented to include comment count in a ticket, and a collapsable option for messages.
Changes implemented to include a search option to sort through messages faster via name, keyword, or phrase.
Design Interaction
To create a better understanding of how each of the new elements interact with one another, an interactive prototype of the changes to Jira’s website is visible below. For a guided description, an interactive prototype video walkthrough was created and can be viewed here:
Interactive prototype of the changes to Jira’s website
Conclusion & Next Steps
Jira is an Atlassian project management tool established to help organizations create and track projects across teams. Jira allows teams to streamline projects by documenting progress, assigning work, monitoring progress, and tracking the status of a project. Findings from this project indicated that Jira’s messaging system within a ticket/issue could be improved to provide greater ease, visibility, and more user control when sifting through messages. Features added to address this included: a search feature, the ability to collapse messages, and the addition of a message number count in a ticket.
Next steps:
additional research is needed to assess whether the changes implemented provide greater efficiency and control to the user when using the tool
a greater sample size and a more diverse sample of individuals, such as design or marketing teams, may shed light on additional aspects of Jira that can be improved