As part of our Q2 roadmap, the Community Product team is working towards improving Review Queues. This project is still in the early stages of discovery. In addition to user research interviews, we are sharing our progress with you today to ask for your feedback before we begin implementation. This is the first post in a series of new communication we hope to have with the community that uses the new product-discovery tag. After we collect community feedback, we will be open to including changes into the next design iteration and continue to share updates with you.
Objective & Goals
Community moderation is an important part of Stack Exchange and we want to provide the best user experience to those volunteering their time across our sites. In parallel to the Close Experience work, we hope these improvements will better support our curator and moderator communities.
We spoke one-on-one with many active reviewers across the Stack Exchange network, conducted data analysis on current Review Queue usage, and read through just about all of the existing issues raised by our community. We used this qualitative and quantitative data to inform our goals and initial design decisions.
In this redesign, we are exploring ways to improve the overall usability of Review Queues. This includes, but is not limited to:
Providing guidance and revisiting the banning experience
The current on-page instructions are not visible and could be misinterpreted, leading new reviewers to make poor decisions. Inappropriate actions on review tasks or audits can lead to a suspension of privileges with no obvious means of understanding what happened.
Adding more context to each queue
Users are opening browser tabs or using user scripts to view the original post they’re reviewing, other answers, and comments to help make educated decisions.
Improving filtering and discovery tools
The filter feature often goes unnoticed and unused. As it exists now, certain combinations of filters can leave queues empty. It is a poor method to discover or target new tasks.
Improving queue workflows and pathways
On Stack Overflow, the Requires Editing action is sending a surplus of poor, unsalvageable posts to bloat the Help and Improvement queue. H&I reviewers are then limited to either Skip or mark the task as Very Low Quality, having it return to the Triage queue and creating a frustrating endless loop.
Along with the Triage queue, First Posts and Late Answers are not fulfilling the goals that they were made to accomplish. These queues were intended to give good posts a head start toward success and filter out bad posts, but tasks could see better, faster intervention in other queues.
What’s next
We’re collecting feedback here on Meta and from 1:1 user interviews. If you have opted-in for user research, you may receive an email invite this week. We’ll be asking questions about how this design may improve (or worsen) review workflows and what you’d like to see in a curated review experience. You can opt-in to future user research opportunities by enabling Research emails in your profile settings.
This project is big. To focus your feedback, we have broken this announcement into three, digestible posts:
- Main post (this post) - Project overview
- Improving Review Queues - Design overview I - Onboarding and Updated Workflows/Paths
- Improving Review Queues - Design overview II - Suspension of Privileges and other new features
We’ll be using community feedback to continue to iterate on this work. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and concerns about this project. Please let us know if there are other Review Queue issues you’d like to see addressed as well.