Tutorials on Jira’s navigation

From the top bar, you can:

• Expand or collapse the sidebar to maximize screen real estate.
• Switch between Atlassian sites and their associated apps if you work across multiple Atlassian organizations, environments, or sites. This is helpful if you're collaborating with different teams, clients, or departments that each use their own Atlassian environments and sites.
• Search across multiple Atlassian apps on your site by using the search bar that’s always present, no matter where you are in Jira or any other Atlassian app.
• Create your work items easily with just a click from the top bar.
• Chat with AI and agents that are powered by Rovo to find what you’re looking for and automate repetitive tasks.
• Access utility items like notifications, help, global settings, and your account for your entire site

For you is a personalized hub with your recent projects, items you’ve worked on, content you’ve viewed, work you’re assigned to, starred items, and more. The For you page helps you resume work and find things you’ve interacted with. In Jira, it shows work items, boards, projects, and other things you’ve recently viewed or worked on, and has a full list of all your starred items.

Starred and Recent are designed for quick access to starred and recent work and contain a search function for quickly finding work. When you expand the navigation item, you'll see a list of starred items and five of your most recently visited items. For example, you’ll see a list of starred projects and the five most recently visited projects.

From the sidebar, you can:

• Resize your sidebar by dragging the line to your preferred width.
• Expand navigation items to reveal nested items to easily scan and work on them.
• Access more actions for each navigation item that allow you to perform quick actions without opening that item.

In Jira, projects bring all your work together in one place, connecting teams, tools, and tasks with full visibility and structure. Whether you're tracking sprints, managing service requests, or coordinating business ops, projects are the backbone that keeps your work organized and aligned to track progress. So, understanding how to navigate to the right place is crucial.

Projects is a navigation item in the sidebar. Selecting it will reveal the projects you’ve starred or recently worked on. You can also view all the projects you have access to on your Jira site. Depending on the type of project, you’ll see the respective navigation items. For example:

• If you’re in a Jira Software project, you’ll see your boards
• If you’re in a Jira Product Discovery project, you’ll see your views and lists
• If you’re in a Jira Service Management project, you’ll see your queues

Quickly create a project from the sidebar by navigating to Projects and selecting Create project (+).

From the sidebar, navigate to Projects and select More actions (•••). From here, you can:

• Manage your projects (for admins only)
• Change the view of what projects are shown
• Hide from sidebar

To work on individual projects, expand Projects, and navigate to the project you want to work on. Perform quick actions on a project by selecting More actions (•••) for that project. From here, you can:

• Add to or remove from Starred
• Add people
• Save as project template
• Access project settings
• Set project background
• Archive or delete the project
• Know the type of project you’re in

Jira should work the way you work and not the other way around. Jira gives you the ability to customize your sidebar so that it reflects how you work.

Use the sidebar's customization feature to mold Jira to your unique way of working and individual preferences. Whether you’re a project lead hopping between boards or a developer jumping into specific issues, a personalized sidebar helps you stay focused and efficient.

To customize the navigation items on your sidebar, simply open the More menu and go to Customize Sidebar. From here, you can:

• Show items: Keep your sidebar clean by selecting only those items you use daily.
• Hide items: Declutter your sidebar by hiding navigation items you rarely use for a cleaner sidebar.
  • If you need the navigation items you’ve hidden, you can still access them from the More menu and bring them back later.
• Reorder items: Put the navigation items you use most often at the top. This saves time, especially if you’re switching between the same few places all day.

In Jira, you have different types of settings that you can access to configure your site, projects, boards, work items, and much more. Let’s see how to access these.