Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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I admit I have mostly avoided using it, so a question:

> Jira is a disaster of UX.

Jira is trying to be all things to all people. It seems to me to be based on a sort of shared illusion, namely that when people talk about work getting done they are talking about the same thing, when in fact they're often talking about wildly different processes, different philosophies. I think that sort of illusion guarantees a UX mess, because it's trying to cover up/accommodate too many different things. Is Jira a UX disaster because of just that? Or is it bad on top of that?

And I worry that makes no sense, so by analogy let's imagine that somebody sold a "transport solution". This sounds great, because transportation is a universal need. But in reality transport solutions include shoes, scooters, bikes, motorcycles, cars, buses, trains, and airplanes. So this "transport solution" comes with a great mess of wheels, gears, shafts, etc, etc, plus reams of Ikea-style instructions for putting pieces together. It's universal, but also guaranteed to be a pain in the ass for any actual specific use.

Don’t mean to create a pile-on, but since you asked, yeah I should explain my barb:

    Is Jira a UX disaster because of just that?
    Or is it bad on top of that?

My opinion - it’s both.

The product has a ton of permutations, as you said, which makes stuff like this happen: Customers who never in the world imagined public issue tracking, suddenly bit by a feature they didn’t even know existed. Conversely I’m sure there are shops, who love this feature, for whom the distinction between “Everyone” and “Open” was always obvious. I don’t envy the team building / supporting the product across all that; I don’t know how I’d do it.

But there are also endemic, continuously-poor design choices large and small. Unannounced and hard to disable major changes to the UI are the standard, and large. I’ll give you one example of the small: Recently, unannounced, the issue comment UI started auto-correcting the capitalization of Atlassian product names in the comment box. Type “JIRA”, get “Jira”. In my words in my issue tracker. (Yes, it was the js app, not the browser). It just always seems so user hostile.

Net net, to me it’s an aging hydra of a product with ongoing missteps. I’d take good design and limited features over what you get here, at least with out heavy investment and expertise.

Not to mention that it's unbearably slow.

I think it is caused by Atlassian changing their branding: since most people did not bother to capitalize 'JIRA', they branded it as 'Jira'. By the way, I am on an older version of Confluence and it autocorrects the other way: 'Jira' to 'JIRA'.

Thanks! This is exactly what I wanted to know.

And now that you describe it, I suspect it's inevitable that anything bad in the first way becomes bad in the second. If the purpose and the use cases are clear, that can guide good design. But if the product is too complex for mere mortals to understand it, then of course the teams building it will eventually turn it into a frankenstein collage of UI issues.

I tend to agree Jira is a bit of a mess, but the responsbility needs to be shared with the users.

- Why buy a complicated mess? - Why let a random Scrum Master / Product Owner manage it? - Why don't we think we need to protect an IT system we buy like an IT system?

Many of the reasons engineers hate Jira are specifically related it being a complicated mess that is hard to use and admin. So if management would listen to engineer about IT systems, maybe this wouldn't happen?

Another possibility is we actually did a risk assessment and what we put in Jira isn't of sufficent risk for us to care, so actually IT doesn't need to be involved because we're not super worried about it leaking.

There are likely worlds of both involved.

My own pet hate is just that it's too slow and often configured in a convoluted way that makes me spend too much time in it.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. The question as phrased is kind of nonsensical. From a bad foundation, it’s not possible to build a good UX. Correctly identifying the problem is a critical step in product development.

To take your transportation example, there is no good way to provide one product which scales from “shoes” to “airplanes” by user configuration. It makes no sense to ask if the shoe-plane is well implemented or not. It’s a terrible concept to begin with.

> Correctly identifying the problem is a critical step in product development.

You make it sound like, otherwise, your product is a failure, while Jira is and incredible success.

I mean, it makes a lot of money. But it's widely hated, and from what I've seen it's pretty bad at solving the problem it purports to solve. I guess some people call that success, but I wouldn't. My goals go beyond filling my pockets.

The problem Jira solves is giving a useless, parasitic class of managers visibility and control of what teams of developers do, because the managers cannot and will not learn what the developers actually do. This is done even at the expense of the productivity of the developers.

Of course, there are good managers of developers. But they neither use nor need Jira.

I think that's exactly it. Many in-house tools are designed not for the users but for the people with power and budgetary authority.

As an aside, I think that's why Agile and Lean methods have been mostly adopted in name only, leaving the substance untouched. The goal of both movements was to shift power to people doing the work, and managers see that as a reduction in importance.

Customization sells

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