Designing Atlassian

What Is Designing Atlassian?

Designing Atlassian is a free publication on Medium that collects articles and insights on design practices at Atlassian, a company known for tools like Jira and Confluence. It serves as a resource in the design category, offering perspectives on product design methodologies, design systems, and workflows used within Atlassian's ecosystem. Designers access it to study real-world applications of design principles in collaborative software development environments, from user research to system-wide iconography and component libraries.

What Designing Atlassian Does

• Publishes articles detailing design methodologies refined through Atlassian projects, such as user journey mapping and persona creation for diverse user categories.
• Documents workshop frameworks for generating solutions that optimize, disrupt, or expand user journeys in tools like Bitbucket.
• Explores design challenges like adapting interfaces for users new to distributed version control systems (DVCS) with terms such as commit, clone, and pull requests.
• Describes processes for avoiding overwhelming navigation by simplifying controls and paths in complex interfaces.
• Covers providing contextual explanations for actions, such as cloning repositories or entering commit messages.
• Shares insights on Atlassian's design system, including Figma structures, design tokens, color variables, typography, and icon systems.

How Designing Atlassian Can Be Used

• Designers reference it during user research phases to apply Atlassian's approaches to segmenting millions of users into personas and rationalizing their needs.
• Teams use described workshop methods in brainstorming sessions, inspired by Google design sprints, to create experiment posters for specific user types.
• Product designers draw from user flow examples to estimate efforts, align development and design streams, and instrument analytics for post-launch analysis.
• Interface designers study case studies on iterative testing, such as modal redesigns based on usability results to improve content separation and readability.
• Design system maintainers consult coverage of icon explorers, migration tools, and contribution plugins for scaling icon libraries across products.
• Workflow planners adapt documented processes, like Confluence templates for blogging or Jira states for content projects, to their own design pipelines.

Who Is Designing Atlassian For?

Designing Atlassian targets product designers, UX researchers, and design system teams working on collaborative software tools similar to Jira, Confluence, or Bitbucket. It suits intermediate to advanced professionals handling growth-oriented projects, user onboarding challenges, or unified design languages across multiple applications. Those building or maintaining design systems—including tokens, icons, and typography—find relevant examples of Atlassian's practices. Experience levels benefit from its focus on practical methodologies rather than beginner tutorials. Visit Designing Atlassian