Problem Definition

When using a touchscreen as an input device, touch/gesture responses are inconsistent and/or behave in an unexpected way when navigating Agile Boards.

The issue has best reproducibility and visibility on a largely populated board with many issues and columns which cause the board to not fit in browser view, necessitating scrolling to see the whole board.

Using a Windows 10 laptop with touchscreen capabilities, on Google Chrome 53.0.2785.116 m:

Rapidly swiping across the screen when starting the swipe in blank space will scroll the page, allowing the user to navigate to offscreen portions of the board. This is expected.

Rapidly swiping across the screen when starting the swipe on an issue will pick the issue up and proceed with moving it around the board, which is unexpected. The effect of this is that largely populated boards can become difficult and unintuitive to scroll through.

Using the same laptop on Firefox instead:

Rapidly swiping across the screen when starting the swipe in blank space will scroll the page, allowing the user to navigate to offscreen portions of the board. This is expected.

Rapidly swiping across the screen when starting the swipe on an issue will still scroll the page, allowing the user to navigate to offscreen portions of the board. This is expected.

Suggested Solution

Normalize the behavior from within the application to match what is expected and happens in Firefox. It's desired that swipes scroll a page, and prolonged holds and then drags can perform a drag and drop instead.

Consider revising JIRA's Supported Platforms documentations to be more explicit about using touchscreens as an input device, as well as Mobile versions of the standard supported browsers.

Workaround 

Consider using a different browser, which may offer different behaviors when it comes to touchscreen behaviors.