Jama's Poor User Experience

Scott Holland
edited October 2021 in

Is anyone else frustrated with Jama's poor user experience? It often feels like they don't consult any real users as part of their design process.

A good example of this is the new 'include item attachments' in the initiate review process.

A key element of this new feature is that the reviewers/approvers must have at least read ('collaborator') access to the items within the review to download the attachments. The review moderator can't grant these permissions… only a Jama admin can do that.

How are moderators supposed to know this?

There is nothing next to the check box to explain this:

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 There's nothing in the help section about permissions:


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 Even the release notes don't explain how it works:

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Our group of 50+ users have been ticking this box without realising that their reviewers don't have the correct permissions. And why would they? There's no warning… no explanation. 

And to make it worse the reviewers still see the attachments in the review: 

But when they click on it they get this very unhelpful error message:

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This could have been handled so much better. Personally, I think that moderators should have an option to grant reviewers permission when they include the attachments. If this isn't an option, then at the very least there should be some on-screen messaging warning that some reviewers won't be able to view the attachments. Or at least bother to update the help section with some decent documentation about how this feature works.

As an idea, maybe something like this when selecting users:

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Comments

  • Scott Holland
    edited October 2021
    We also use Jira and MS DevOps and the difference in usability between those and Jama is stark. 

    As just one example, look at how Jira explains these options. There's a nice little message to go with each option and it signposts you to more information if the feature is more complex. 


    image

    Is anyone else frustrated with Jama's poor user experience? It often feels like they don't consult any real users as part of their design process.

    A good example of this is the new 'include item attachments' in the initiate review process.

    A key element of this new feature is that the reviewers/approvers must have at least read ('collaborator') access to the items within the review to download the attachments. The review moderator can't grant these permissions… only a Jama admin can do that.

    How are moderators supposed to know this?

    There is nothing next to the check box to explain this:

    image

     There's nothing in the help section about permissions:


    image

     Even the release notes don't explain how it works:

    image

    Our group of 50+ users have been ticking this box without realising that their reviewers don't have the correct permissions. And why would they? There's no warning… no explanation. 

    And to make it worse the reviewers still see the attachments in the review: 

    But when they click on it they get this very unhelpful error message:

    image

    This could have been handled so much better. Personally, I think that moderators should have an option to grant reviewers permission when they include the attachments. If this isn't an option, then at the very least there should be some on-screen messaging warning that some reviewers won't be able to view the attachments. Or at least bother to update the help section with some decent documentation about how this feature works.

    As an idea, maybe something like this when selecting users:

    image
  • Scott Holland
    edited October 2021
    Another example of this is perfectly demonstrated when creating a relationship. I've been using Jama for years but I still find this dialog confusing. It's not clear which item it's referring to when you're selecting the upstream/downstream direction:


    image


    The equivalent process in MS DevOps is much clearer... it spells out which item you're adding a link from:

    image
  • Kevin Steigerwald
    edited October 2021
    Hi Scott -- appreciate all the notes and screenshots here (as well as in the email from earlier this week).

    As mentioned in email, but added here for visibility for anyone else coming to this thread, I agree with you on the items you have listed out here and my team is digging into it from the usability side. A ticket will also be filed to update documentation as well.

    With regards to our design process, I can assure you we talk to customers (but as I'm sure we would both agree, we'd love to talk to more) and those conversations lead directly into updates we are making. As an example, looking at the notes from our team's last conversation with you on usability, the majority of the items on that list are being worked on, researched, or in our design backlog. Also in looking at the last several releases, the majority of content being released is tied directly to user input -- so we appreciate the feedback and are trying to work quickly through it. (Though, perhaps too quickly in some cases, as your comments above reflect some missed opportunities to provide better documentation and user experience. I'll bring this to the attention of my team.)

    Hoping more people see this post and chime in with more feedback. As an alternative, I'd encourage folks to sign up at https://research.jamasoftware.com -- when we kick off projects and design initiatives, we often pull from this list of users first.
    Kevin Steigerwald
    Director of Product Design
    Jama Software
  • Scott Holland
    edited October 2021

    Hi Kevin. Thanks for the response. It's good to hear that you're listening to users and some of the recent UI updates to the navigations menus are a good start to getting Jama's user experience to a better place. 

    I'm just frustrated that you would release a new feature that seems so poorly implemented. Jama seems to place the burden on its users to research the intricacies of how its system works instead of making features intuitive (or at least providing clear on-screen messaging).

    This new feature was causing so much confusion that I had to write up some documentation myself to explain to our users how this feature works (see below). It's taken quite a bit of time to deal with.

    I'll definitely sign up to your research list… I'd be happy to provide input!

    Thanks,

    Scott

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  • Vanessa H
    Vanessa H Business/Systems Analyst
    edited October 2021
    This is excellent feedback. You may want to submit it to the Ideation section where Jama has users suggest functionality changes.
  • Scott Holland
    edited October 2021
    Hi Vanessa. Thanks for your reply. I submitted an ideation about the poor UI a while back. I've also raised this with them directly several times over the years