What just happened to Confluence Cloud?
Asked by Robert Lauriston:

The left-hand page tree nav bar just disappeared from my space, and I can't find any way to navigate other than searching. There doesn't seem to be a page tree anywhere in the Space Tools.

I can't find the admin tools to log a support issue, either.


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: For those of us still not liking it, there may be some hope. See one or both of

* <https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/Calling-all-Confluence-Cloud-users-Give-us-feedback-on-a-new/td-p/1139742>
* <https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-discussions/Calling-all-Jira-Cloud-users-Give-us-feedback-on-our-exploration/m-p/1126694>

and give them some feedback


author: Scott Beeson
body: Hey, it took them 2 years, but they listened!


author: Ash Helm
body: Leave the #$%ing Tree alone - it was FINE. Its our primary navigation tool - enter the space, hit the tree, navigate = Done! Now we are stuck with new age hippie UX bullshit that requires clicking our dumb arse around the UI just to get to the Tree. We pay thousands for this system, specifically cause it has a kick-arse Tree - why are we being asked to wear this UX #$%-up?


author: Corey Redlien
body: Registered to add my complaint to this. The Page-Tree in the left nav, and how it provides structure guidance to users is one of the main reasons we use confluence! Please add back!


author: Martin Sauter
body: I am very happy to see that other Confluence users share my frustration about the new UI. There are many aspects to it, but the new page tree is the worst part of something that looks nice, but is terrible to use.

May main pain points:

* The new page tree takes significantly more time to load. (Atlassian made some improvements here recently, but still.)
* It is not instantly visible when you open a space, you have to click the \<\<Pages\>\> icon first, and even then it does not appear in the sidebar, but on the right hand side.
* When I find a page through full text search, quite often the page tree does not unfold, so I don't see the position of that page in the page hierarchy.
* The new design is less compact, so you have less information on the same screen, and this is also true for the number of page tree entries you can see at once.
* You can not manually rearrange the page order in the page tree anymore.

I just learned that the opt-out option will go away soon and that we will be forced to use the new UI soon. This will be the day when I'll start evaluating an alternative to Confluence Cloud.


author: Nicholas Wade
body: Oi! what rose-coloured glasses are you wearing?

Confluence Cloud is the most miserable misconception I have ever had the misfortune to come across.

Confluence not flash? Well, that's because there is nothing to be flashy about. This crippled machiavellian product should be shelved along with such wonders as the Sinclair C5.

"but Confluence is not a liesure time application".. there is no leisure time! You spend every moment trying to configure the document as things slip around the screen out of control. This is simply the worst application I have ever ...ever had the misfortune to be using.

..." it is a tool to get stuff done quickly..." NO..no..niete, non.! You definitely will not get stuff done quickly.. sure, you will feel like you have, because you will be slapping stuff up there like plaster... but truth be told, you will spend hours...days... seeking out help for stupid problems or fiddling with templates that just go berserk on you.

Oh... and the reason it does not take a 40 hour course (what kind of dummy needs 40 hours?) is because the interface is infantile. I'd be better off prodding the tools with a water lollypop.

So... I have not got off my soap box... I hate this wretched, miserable devils spawn and long for a normal writing tool.

Thank you...


author: Michael Corvin
body: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHH....

Just verified that nested tables are indeed gone.

We use nested tables very often and there is absolutely no technically justifiable reason to make them 'unsupported'. (On our older server sites we created pages through the REST API that include complex table xml that renders just fine - it must be that they're just limiting them because their GUI editor can't handle them?)

**WTF is Atlassian's major management and technical malfunction?!?!?!?!?!?! They are effectively destroying what was the class leading collaboration toolset that was worth the COT$.**

That's it, we're done. Not spending another dime on Confluence if I can help it (tho we're stuck with one cloud site used for in-house work for the time being. sigh).

*We'll keep all our existing server sites at their current revisions so as not to break years of legacy usage. And for new projects we're transitioning to XWiki. If they screw Jira up as royally as Confluence we'll actively seek to replace that too.*

Cleary, all the complaints and comments here in the community, mostly by those of us who have been the evangelists, administrators and trainers for Confluence/Jira/etc are irrelevant to Atlassian.


author: Till Noever
body: Been continuing to follow this discussion, even though I was/am/will-continue-to-be fed up with Atlassian and their approach to development. I'm also frustrated because I can read the signs and they aren't good.

Still, I have a question: Am I the only one who is truly astonished by what looks to me like Atlassian's cluelessness about what their user base actually does with this tool? More specifically: Are they actually clueless, or is this crappy 'new experience' the result of careful market surveys, and not just of developer/marketer group-think?

The alternative of course is that in both cases where I was contracting for (large!) organisations using Confluence I got what amounts to an unrepresentative sample, and that what they're doing now is actually for the best of Atlassian's business, even though it is annoying to those here expressing their opinion and who obviously are less than pleased with the changes and the company's attitude. Maybe the uproar here is not representative of the user base as a whole, and we're just hearing from those of us who do have reasons to object to the treatment we're getting.

If this is the case, then Atlassian are almost certainly going to continue with their development-behavior as they have in this last 'new experience'...


author: Poochee Yuen
body: It's aboslutely horrible, I was just getting the hang of using Confluence, telling my staff to move on to it. Now I really regret it.

This is the most unintuitive layout/ UI I have ever seen. There 's nothing like hunting for your important information and not finding them where they used to be.

Whoever suggested this is a sadist.

A real killer when it comes to improving customers' life.


author: Prem Chudzinski _extensi_
body: Move to server :)


author: Liron
body: Can you please raise a support ticket? This obviously is a bug on your instance.

Thanks!


author: Helen Griffith
body: (I like the new font too. But everything else makes me really sad.)


author: Till Noever
body: No thanks. I'm tired of this whole discussion and am bowing out.

You guys will do as you please anyway. Sign of the times.

I was a software developer for almost 30 years before I became a techwriter, and in those days long gone, we kind of paid attention to what people actually wanted--and to fixing bugs first!--before diving into changes imagined by people who think they know better than their user-base what's good for the latter, or what said users would actually like to see. All in the name of 'new experiences'. Which, frankly, is nonsense, but definitely the current *Zeitgeist*; with software producers of all kinds assuming that their clients consist mostly of 'experience' neophiliacs.

They don't. And your designers definitely do not know 'better' what clients want than said clients. So maybe next time you guys should do some serious market and real 'user' surveys before conjuring up more new 'experiences'.

To end on a positive note: I do prefer the new font! Much.


author: Till Noever
body: Let me say it in the fewest possible words:

*The Page Tree should **always be visible**, no matter* what*type of page is displayed.*

(Unless a user turns that default off by choice.)

Also, I find the following statement almost unbelievably arrogant and condescending:

*"Please use this time to adjust and also let us know of anything you find in the new experience that is holding you back."*

Am I the only one?


author: Till Noever
body: How clear can anybody be? Seriously!

I want the page tree there ***by default.***

NO looking around for it. NO clicking here and there. NO need to explain to new users how they get it. It just should be *there*. Because it is arguably Confluence's most useful identifyable UI feature.

Overview pages are secondary, and for those who actually have a use for 'overviews'. Only a very small number of those who use Confluence in our organisation actually do. I suspect this also is the case in most other instabces.

Is that so difficult to understand? People look for information about specific things. Or they want to add information about specific things. The number of those who want 'meta information' is minuscule in comparison.


author: umwerk Confluence
body: I'm also shocked by the fact you can't switch to the old UI. As a UX Researcher and Usability Engineer the abolishment of the old Page Tree is probably the biggest Backward-Leap I've ever encountered.   

The whole concept behind the old UI was the hierarchy which is now killed by disabling the classic tree which exactly showed you the order and dependencies of the respective knowledge.

I also don't see an Opt Out Option. As a paying customer I think, that the customer itself should be able to decide what UI Layout to use and which not.


author: Jim Brent
body: I am a Confluence (Atlassian Tool set) Fan and evangelist... One of the things I liked about Atlassian Tools is they are NOT flashy and they don't mess with non-functional unnecessary "whatevers" .... AND it always works easily... Until now...

The new UI is something right out of the pages of Microsoft UI Development. (Remember the Windows 8 UI failure)... We previously used SharePoint for all our documentation and Project Management when it was logical and almost text-based (Version 2007) it wasn't all that pretty but pretty much ANYONE in our organization could find stuff and figure out how to use the tool... Then Microsoft went crazy and created all these LARGE icons and messed up all the features we used before the upgrade of 2010 \& 2013... Then EVERYONE, including the executives, and young people alike dropped SharePoint like a rock... So we switched to a professional tool set - Atlassian... Everyone was able to figure it out in almost no time at all.

And now Atlassian appears to have adopted the same short-sighted UI improvement approach that all the kool kids use for their video games and shopping sites... I hate to mention it but Confluence is not a liesure time application or a shopping website... it is a tool to get stuff done quickly without having to take a 40 hour course to figure out how to do simple tasks...

Off soap-box.

Thanks for listening... Atlassian is a top notch tool suite (we use it for lots more than just software development)... please don't mess it up for us users...

Thank you...


author: Helen Griffith
body: Really good point about the massive indents. The dots don't annoy me so much, but yes, the indents. Urgh.

I'm glad the page tree is back but I do still miss the option to overwrite the left-hand nav with my own custom content. But I've given up hope of having the ability to customize anything.


author: Dmitry Astapkovich _Colined_
body: 1. It there any chance to get rid of two things in the sidebar:

- old school meaningless dots

- huge indents?

![shot_180607_225307.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/24075iCCAD32C3D2A09BCF/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "shot_180607_225307.png")

2. Is it possible to store my tree state? Currently every time I open or reload the page it collapses everything back to lvl 0, so I have to expand it back all the time.  

3. Is it possible to make font for page names in Children Display macro bigger? Currently it's way too small, especially when HUGE BLACK dots are so close. Yeah, those old school ones. I want to wipe them from this place as well:

![shot_180607_231040.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/24077i88BB812A695DDAF6/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "shot_180607_231040.png")

4. Is it possible to add hover reaction on V and \> icons? Now the click are is big enough, but there's no highlight for the it, which makes clicking a bit difficult:  

![shot_180607_231511.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/24078iEC44E7E078F1DC40/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "shot_180607_231511.png")

5. Is is possible to assign icons to the custom links in the sidebar? Same default icons look not informative and get in the way, while they shouldn't:

![shot_180607_231600.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/24079i9FCA75C10A5B6C7A/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "shot_180607_231600.png")

5.1 Is it possible to keep the custom icons as a list/column for at least for 2-3 items, when the sidebar is collapsed?

![shot_180607_231856.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/24081i32EE1E4DA90C9546/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "shot_180607_231856.png")

5.2 If 5.1 is too complex to be done, is it possible to pop up the list of links at the same spot. Currently the list jumps sky high:

<br />

![shot_180607_232310.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/24082iCEDD100934BEDE1A/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "shot_180607_232310.png")

Thank you for reading! I could not expect someone will reach this of depth of my whining =)

I do know the answer. Nothing will be done, because ... well, because it's not important, I guess. But please, Atlassian people, next time you see "Don't #@!% the customer" poster in your office, take a moment and remember this thread. Just to keep it real.

![shot_180607_232606.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/24084i0C464FF78C0E2AB6/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "shot_180607_232606.png")


author: Dmitry Astapkovich _Colined_
body: And yes, good luck with this trick in the mobile device.

And yes, this option is saved by user. So if you'll be lucky enough to click this invisible button on the mobile device, it will collapse the sidebar in your desktop browser.


author: Josh Mings
body: Click on the border between the sidebar and content. It will minimize/maximize the sidebar. Will not completely hide it though.


author: Josh Mings
body: We've got the page tree back finally!


author: Kim Abbott
body: This!!!! Please listen to the USERS of this tool, not the project managers that are trying to justify their existence by creating changes that aren't necessary and are counter-productive!!


author: Neil Yalowitz
body: The "hide sidebar" button disappeared.

How can a user hide the sidebar during a presentation? Just grab the edge and try to make it skinny?


author: Olivia Hydari
body: i quit jira today. migrating my team to asana or trello.

will keep using confluence.


Tags: blog

confluence-cloud

new-ui-2018