I can only imagine you are being a frog slowly boiled to death.
JIRA (and confluence) are the slowest web apps I’ve had the pleasure of using. Simple navigation takes seconds when bouncing through pages. Accidentally clicking the wrong issue is physically painful. When I think JIRA I think glossy silver spinners.
I've just timed it on a bug detail page - it takes 7.8 seconds to complete with janky loading of different sections/data. I find it impossible to believe this is server related - looks more like they have terrible frontend code.
We are using JIRA's cloud offering and it's the slowest application I use. It's slow enough that I don't care about any of the other (pretty glaring) UX flaws.
It often takes more than 2000ms to switch views (e.g. just to switch from looking at an issue to the board showing list of issues in the current sprint for my team). Sometimes, 5000ms plus.
It's so slow that I've noticed everybody does what I do, namely ⌘-click all links so that they open in a new tab. That way you don't "lose" what you are currently looking at, and have to endure another 2000ms load time just to see it again.
Everybody's JIRA window has like 40 tabs open by the end of the day.
One result of this, beyond being irritated, is that meaningful bug discussion never happens on the ticket comment threads, the way it used to with GitHub Issues, or the way it would happen if JIRA was as fast as a normal app (like, say, GitHub Issues). The discussion is all on Slack now, completely separated from the issue tracker and super hard to find when you need it.
I occasionally manage to paste a few Slack links into JIRA bug comments, since I already have that tab open and I know nobody else will.
We didn't love the feature set and UI of GitHub Issues, either. (Hence the sadly failed search for a new tool that resulted in JIRA.)
But it wasn't slow, so people did actually use it. I don't think we have a features/UI problem with JIRA. If it was fast, I think people would use it about the same as they did GitHub Issues.
But it is slow, so engineers use it very minimally: create an issue (which is usually done via our Slack chatbot, because using the JIRA UI is so annoyingly slow that somebody wrote a bot to automate that), put the issue into a sprint, and then close an issue when it is finally done. Those are the 3 operations we do.
I think the project manager people are OK with JIRA, because they mainly use it to generate fairly complex reports that admittedly are pretty useful to see how we did in the past iteration compared to our goals. That is SUPER SUPER slow too, but they don't mind as much because it's a bi-weekly thing they do, not something they do over and over throughout the day.
I think JIRA has a variety of other usability problems, but the deadly slowness outweighs all of them combined. We still "use" JIRA in the sense that it's the system we use to track bugs. But we don't actually use it much at all — because it's slow.
