Experiment: More aggressive review queue indicator

Question

Over on Meta Stack Exchange, I announced an experiment that would:

• Turn on the review queue indicator whenever there's a task available in any queue.

• All queues with at least one task will be marked with a red dot. There are no grey dots:

  

This will mean you'll be notified of outstanding tasks you can't clear. We are aware of a problem that people will be notified of queues that they don't have the privilege to access. That's next on the list to fix. The goal is to be more aggressive with the indicator to see if we can clear tasks more quickly. Please let us know if we've gone too far.

And in general, we're interested in any feedback to this change: positive, negative or noncommittal.

Answer 1

As in inveterate queue clearer, the behavioural impact is negligible. The cognitive impact, however, is unwelcome. The red dot immediately signals dread: "Oh, there are a heap of these things to deal with now..."

Save the red for when you really need it (ie., when the queue really is backed up: 10 or more, or whatever the old threshold was). Bring back the grey so the site feels less like it is on fire all the time.

Answer 2

I definitely agree the review queue indicator needs to be more aggressive, but it's neither a good idea nor necessary to sacrifice the urgency indication feature just for that. Instead of setting the whole site on fire, how about a yellow-to-red transition?

One could even think about always having a dot on every queue, maybe green for empty ones – those traffic light colors are quite unambiguous.¹

Of course the color of the review button dot should always match the darkest yellow/red, and there should be no dot only if every queue is green.

1: “Red” meaning „Stop! Don't add any questions to this queue before you did your review duty!“ ;-)

Answer 3

Spoken about review queues, please change/repair the mobile apps so it's finally possible to do those tasks from within the app . I rarely use the website and thus rarely perform review tasks. An indicator no matter how big it is helps in this situation. The same goes for participation in elections, the winterbash and more stuff like that.

Answer 4

Because I was curious, I clicked through to the SEDE query to see what U&L's "N" value would be for turning the indicator red.

Re-quoting the meta post:

Each queue may be in one of three states:

• No dot (empty queue)
• Grey dot (at least one but fewer than N review tasks)
• Red dot (N or more review tasks)

And as of today, U&L values are:

Name                90% of hourly samples less than this many tasks
Close Votes         4
First Post          1
Low Quality Posts   1
Late Answer         0
Reopen Vote         0
Suggested Edit      0

I'm not sure how the math would turn out for grey or red.

Given the low number of average items in the U&L queue, I'd prefer a grey dot for any non-zero queue (at any time), and a red dot for ... numbers substantially higher than the above.

My personal suggestion for red-dot levels would be:

Close Votes         10+
First Post          10+
Low Quality Posts   10+
Late Answer         5+
Reopen Vote         5+
Suggested Edit      10+