Thomas, no offense taken. Thanks

Thomas, I know answers like this can come off as canned or insincere but these things keep me up at night. Like most designers, I do take pride in my and my team's work and when we miss the mark it's not something we take lightly. We can't hunker down and pretend like we nailed it. We know it's iterative and we can and will continue to improve. Jira is admittedly not the easiest problem space as it's highly customized by admins before many users even see the product. In many cases, we'll show up at a customer visit and see the product configured in a way we hadn't even anticipated. The good news is I have a role open on the Jira team in Sydney for anyone who'd like to join the effort to improve it.

Yes, Scott, we have to admit that, as a design team, we missed the mark on this one. The reasons are many and varied. I’m sure people on this thread who have shipped products in the past can probably guess them :). The short story is that we optimized the collapsed sidebar as a way to help people quickly move around Jira. We're currently exploring ways to reduce the complexity you’ve addressed here. We have a couple of early solutions in the hopper, and will be rolling them out over the coming weeks and months. We very much appreciate the feedback and are working quickly to improve the new experience to help our customers get the most of Jira. Robert (Head of Design, Jira + Confluence for cloud)