7 Lessons We’ve Learned at the Atlassian App Week 2018
Last month my Team travelled to the sunny city of Miami to take part in the Atlassian App Week. It gathered Atlassian Partners and app vendors to guide on how we should develop our products and improve them to help customers achieve business results. This particular edition of the event primarily focused on UX design, due to ongoing implementation of the new interface in Jira.
Despite the focus on design, there was a lot of technical information available to the developers — mainly in terms of AUI, AtlasKit and React components. It appeared that along with Adaptavist, we’re the pioneers in using AtlasKit for building our apps’ UI, so the ideas we got from Jony Cheung and Chris Darroch were pretty inspiring.
Among other hot trending topics, Trello Power-Ups and apps for Stride were discussed. The latter has recently hit general availability and is going to replace HipChat very soon. Even though these new platforms are not getting monetized this year, they seem very promising and app-friendly.
Update: Atlassian announced discontinuation of both Stride and HipChat due to a strategic partnership with Slack in late July.
Apart from consuming speeches prepared by the Atlassians, we talked to them face-to-face and received valuable feedback on what we’ve done so far. These are 7 most important lessons we’ve learned at the App Week.
Lesson 1: A holistic approach to UX design is vital
User experience builds upon a whole ecosystem of people who develop and use software, their common practices and ways to do it, along with the tools they use. Therefore, the full user’s journey with our product, brand, and people must be taken into account, from how the need for a feature emerges to the help they need to get started and running once installed.
Having such a big picture at disposal, a designer’s work is not anymore only about how the product looks and feels.
With a holistic mindset applied, experience design is about creating every kind of activity related to it — be it feature writing, usability tests, documentation or brand communication.
Lesson 2: Content is part of our product
As an implication, everything we do about our product to make it friendly to users and fit in their lives counts along with the coding, so we should analyze and improve these activities constantly as well. In fact, there is a common misunderstanding of Agile Manifesto in its second principle: an email informing users on the latest update actually can be of the same importance as its main feature in terms of creating a holistic experience.
Timely communication is even more pivotal in a frequently releasing, Agile environment like Jira. That’s why we write articles on the blog and update our user documentation often.
Lesson 3: The new Jira experience is game-changing
The new design scales to support over 50 apps on the issue view and does not slow down after installing the new ones! That is part of Atlassian’s concept of agility in design, as they want to make their software as transparent and customizable as possible. So they introduced and are gradually switching to the new Jira experience with a revamped interface, a couple of new features and a fresh look. It is already available on Cloud, and Server and Data Center versions are coming soon.
The new design scales to support over 50 apps on the issue view and does not slow down after installing the new ones.
Lesson 4: Showing is better than telling what to do
User onboarding was definitely the prominent topic during the App Week. Kelly Snow and Lucy Denton showed the recent data report by Andrew Chen, which states that an average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days post-install. To prevent this, we should guide our users into the apps quickly and seamlessly. Here come such design tricks as spotlights, Getting Started pages inside Jira, or videos inside the documentation. We’re going to implement these in all our products in the nearest future.
Also, we’ve made a couple of webinars about customising Jira with our apps. We’ll continue making them to satisfy your hunger for knowledge and show new ways to make your work easier.
An average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days post-install.
Lesson 5: If you host events, make the agenda data-driven
Apparently, user experience of software can be often extended to offline, especially with events. If you decide for making your own event, maximizing its value for the guests should be the highest priority. By an example of Atlas Camp, the Atlassians showed us how they collect satisfaction data and improve the events they make based on these surveys.
At Jira Day 2018, which we hosted in Warsaw in mid-March, we also collected feedback from our guests, speakers and Partners. Not only did we conduct a survey about the event — we also asked them tricky questions about Jira. We’ll share some interviews with you soon — stay tuned to our LinkedIn and Twitter to get the updates!
Lesson 6: It’s worth to be a Verified vendor
Miles Buckley presented a graph showing that Marketplace apps marked with the Atlassian Verified badge score 6 times more installs, higher ratings and customer satisfaction than the ones without it. The badge makes our apps a part of the whole Atlassian experience for the users, which feels like safe for them, so we should strive for it to have a better chance. In fact, this is a quality mark that Atlassian give to their trusted Partners.
Marketplace apps marked with the Atlassian Verified badge score 6 times more installs, higher ratings and customer satisfaction than the ones without it.
Lesson 7: It’s great to be a part of the Atlassian Community
The 2+ million Community has become the first go-to knowledge base for many Atlassian software users within one year. What follows, it’s getting enriched with features — for instance, vendors can publish articles on the forum since January. It is a great opportunity to share our expertise and receive feedback quickly. We’re happy that Atlassian have come up with a way to unite its users. We appreciate it very much and will try to help as much as we can!
The App Week is a fantastic event worth repeating, especially in such pleasant natural conditions as Florida and the venue like Marriott Resort Key Largo Bay. We had a great time and a rare occasion to collaborate directly with Atlassian developers and designers. The changes that we’re going to take will affect all the apps we have on the Atlassian Marketplace, so this edition was surely a milestone for our product development. It was also very nice to meet our Partners and other vendors, share thoughts and simply hang out at the beach.
Thank you for this wonderful experience!
This article has been updated in October 2022.
