Use assignment to set or change who is responsible for a specific work item, task list to show fixed task rows with status, review queue to triage many items needing work, and approval workflow to route a submitted request through governed decisions.
Use assignment to set or change who is responsible for a specific work item, task list to show fixed task rows with status, review queue to triage many items needing work, and approval workflow to route a submitted request through governed decisions.
Practice the judgment: Imagine this situation: Reassignment erases the previous owner, reason, or handoff context, making accountability unclear. Write the person's goal, choose one of these patterns, and show the state that helps the person continue. Use the decision rules and source trail below to explain your choice.
Review the underlying principle →| Dimension | Assignment | Task list | Review queue | Approval workflow | Mentions | Object picker | Notification center | Activity feed | Permission sharing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UI or UX | UI + UX - Responsibility control for assigning a work item to eligible people, teams, roles, bots, or no owner | UI + UX - Component-level list of linked task rows with names, hints, and statuses | UI + UX - Actionable queue for triaging many items that need human review | UI + UX - Routed decision workflow for requests that require authorized approval | UI + UX - Inline recipient reference with autocomplete, stable recipient identity, notification routing, access checks, and broad-audience safeguards | UI + UX - Existing-entity lookup and selected-object confirmation | UI + UX - Durable user-opened notification history and action drawer | UI + UX - Catch-up stream of recent collaboration and work events with actor, verb, object, type, destination, and triage controls | UI + UX - Durable permission administration for users, groups, roles, inherited access, effective access, and revocation |
| UI guidance | Render assignment as a responsibility field on a specific work item with current assignee, unassigned state, eligibility-filtered candidate picker, self-assign affordance, reassign and clear controls, notification outcome, and visible responsibility wording. | Give each control a clear label and visible state. | Render review queue as an actionable worklist with queue scope, counts, filters, sort order, row reason, owner, priority, age or SLA, status, preview context, selection, and row actions. | Render approval workflow as a routed request record with requester, object, requested action, approver eligibility, required rule, current gate, due date, decision controls, comment history, and outcome consequences. | Show mention suggestions at the caret with names, handles, avatars, teams, channels, availability or scope hints, permission warnings, and keyboard-highlight state; distinguish exact matches, ambiguous display names, unavailable recipients, and broad-audience mentions. | Show enough fields to distinguish same-named objects before selection, and keep the selected object preview visible after the popup closes so the submitted entity can be inspected. | Provide a persistent notification entry point, usually a bell or inbox control, with a count that represents new unseen notifications rather than every unread item forever. | Render activity feed as a typed event stream where each item names the actor or source app, action, object, workspace or channel, timestamp, preview, event type, read or cleared state when supported, and a stable destination for follow-up. | Render permission sharing as an access-management surface with the protected resource, current direct grants, inherited grants, groups, guests, anonymous or link access, role or permission level, effective access, pending changes, and revoke or save actions. |
| UX guidance | Make assignment changes traceable and reversible enough for teamwork: explain who owns the item now, who was notified, whether the assignee can act, what changed in assigned-to-me views, and what happens to existing watchers, reviewers, collaborators, or queues. | Use task list when users need to scan a known set of service tasks, understand what each task is, choose a task to start or resume, and see each task's current status. | Use review queue when a team repeatedly processes a changing set of tickets, comments, pull requests, content items, cases, requests, or records that require human inspection and action. | Make the approval route understandable over time: who has the request, what decision is needed, what happens on approval or rejection, what blocks self-review, and where the requester can revise or withdraw. | Use mentions when a user needs to call attention to a person, team, channel, role, or group from inside a message, comment, task, document, issue, or thread while keeping the reference embedded in the authored content. | Use an object picker when the user must choose an existing entity whose identity matters beyond the displayed label, such as a record, person, group, account, file, team, project, or workspace. | Use a notification center when users receive enough asynchronous system or collaboration updates that they need a durable place to review, triage, and act later. | Protect attention by grouping low-value repetition, preserving meaningful actors and destinations, distinguishing mention/reply/reaction/app/reminder/project-change types, and routing audit evidence, long-form content, and live status elsewhere. | Use permission sharing when authorized owners or admins need to grant, change, audit, or revoke durable access to a space, site, repository, folder, project, board, dataset, environment, or sensitive object. |
| Good UI | An issue sidebar shows Assignee: Maya Chen, Assign to me, Change assignee, Clear, eligible teammate search, reviewer separate from assignee, and a note that the new assignee will be notified. | A task list row for Upload evidence shows the task name, a short hint, a linked row, and a Needs attention status with the unavailable reason in the row text. | A moderation queue has Held, Likely spam, Reported, and Escalated tabs, row evidence, policy reason, reviewer claim state, approve/remove/escalate actions, and bulk-action preview. | A production deployment request shows requester, service, environment, change summary, required reviewer group, self-review restriction, wait timer, Approve and Reject with reason controls, and a timeline of route changes. | A comment composer opens a suggestion list after @, shows people and teams with avatars, handles, access labels, and keyboard focus, then inserts a mention chip for Priya Rao. | A Related account field shows two Acme Retail records with account ID, region, status, and owner, then displays a selected-object preview card before saving. | A bell opens a drawer with Unread and All filters, showing comment mentions, approval requests, export results, and background-job failures in newest-first order. | A team activity feed shows Priya mentioned you in #refunds, Build bot marked release-128 failed, Maya reacted to your handoff note, and Rahul merged PR #742, each with icon, timestamp, preview, type filter, and Open action. | A repository access page lists teams, outside collaborators, deploy keys, and direct users with Read, Triage, Write, Maintain, and Admin roles, showing that only Admin can manage access. |
| Bad UI | Automatic assignment points to a stale default owner. | A task list uses uppercase button-like status pills and users click the status instead of the row. | The most urgent or oldest item is buried by default sort. | A stale email approval applies to a request version that has changed. | Mention chips break when copied, pasted, edited, localized, or rendered in plain-text fallbacks. | A text field accepts Acme Retail as free text even though the backend needs a record ID. | Users ignore the center because duplicate low-value messages inflate the badge. | A feed includes every presence heartbeat and typing event, making mentions and failed deployment events impossible to find. | A permissions page shows only individual names and Remove buttons even though group membership and parent folder inheritance still grant access. |
| Good UX | A triager changes a support ticket from unassigned to Priya, adds a handoff note, sees that Priya has access and capacity warning, and the ticket appears in Priya's assigned-to-me queue. | A user scans five task rows, sees that Financial history is incomplete, selects anywhere on that row, completes the section, and returns to find the row status changed to Completed. | A reviewer claims the oldest SLA-at-risk ticket, opens a preview, assigns it to Billing, returns to the queue with the row removed, and lands on the next oldest item. | A finance approval requires both manager and controller approval; the first approval advances the sequence, a rejection stops downstream processing, and the requester sees the exact rejection reason and revise action. | A user mentions @Dana in a private incident note, sees that Dana lacks access, chooses Invite and mention, and the resulting notification opens the exact note. | A user searches Acme, compares two same-named records by region and status, selects the active EMEA account, and reviews the selected account ID before saving. | Opening the notification drawer clears the new-notification badge while unread items remain available for later triage. | A user filters Activity to mentions and replies, answers one thread inline, clears low-value reactions, saves a custom view for VIPs, and opens a deployment failure in the source app. | A space admin removes Maya from a direct grant but sees she still has View through the Contractors group, so they remove the group grant or ask a site admin to update group membership. |
| Bad UX | An automatic assignment silently routes every new component issue to a former maintainer and leaves the team with stale ownership. | A completed row has the strongest colour treatment, so users repeatedly revisit it instead of incomplete rows. | A reviewer marks a pull request reviewed from an old queue row after the author pushed new commits and re-requested review. | The first approver clicks Approve and the system marks the whole request approved even though policy required everyone to approve. | A mention notification opens the record homepage rather than the exact comment sentence, forcing the recipient to search for why they were pulled in. | A user picks the first Acme result because every row looks identical, then links the case to the wrong account. | Users mark all notifications read and lose the only record of an export job they still need to download. | A user clears a notification in Activity but the notification center badge stays out of sync and the same event reappears as unread. | A repository admin removes a collaborator but forgets a deploy key with write access because the access page treated machine credentials as unrelated settings. |
| Best fit | A user must set, change, or clear who is accountable for a work item. | A page needs to display a known set of tasks with status and links to start or resume them. | A team or individual repeatedly reviews many independently queued items. | A submitted request needs authorized approval before a deployment, purchase, access grant, publication, content change, policy exception, financial action, or workflow step can proceed. | Composed content needs to target people or groups inline. | Users assign, link, reference, invite, route, or attach an existing entity. | Users receive multiple asynchronous updates across objects, jobs, collaborators, approvals, or reminders. | Users need to catch up on recent collaboration, app, repository, channel, project, meeting, reminder, or task activity. | Owners or admins need to manage durable access to spaces, sites, repositories, projects, folders, datasets, boards, environments, or sensitive objects. |
| Avoid when | The user only needs to mention or notify someone in conversation. | Users are browsing arbitrary records rather than completing a fixed set of service tasks. | The task is a single request moving through a governed approval route. | The user only needs to check their own answers before submission. | The user is selecting a structured owner, assignee, approver, or recipient field outside written content. | Any arbitrary text is valid. | The product has only occasional current-action feedback that a toast or inline status can handle. | The surface is primarily content consumption, media browsing, or article-like stream reading. | The user is requesting access after denial rather than administering access. |
| Required state | Unassigned item state. | Linked startable task row. | Queue loading and count state | Draft or submit-ready request handoff state | Highlighted suggestion, keyboard-selected suggestion, mouse or touch-selected suggestion, and inserted mention token. | Empty object lookup field with label, helper text, and current search scope. | Closed entry-point state with zero, new-unseen, and unread-but-seen counts. | Default feed state with actor, verb, object, timestamp, source, type icon, preview, scope, and destination for each activity item. | Default access list state with users, groups, guests, anonymous access, roles, and effective access. |
| Accessibility burden | Label the assignment field with the current assignee, item name, and responsibility meaning. | Use list semantics for the collection of task rows and clear heading structure for grouped task lists. | Use labelled queue name, count, filters, sort, group, row status, selection, preview, and action controls. | Use labelled request summary, approver, status, due date, decision, comment, and history regions. | Expose the suggestion list as a labelled popup tied to the editor and announce the number of available mention targets. | Give the lookup field a persistent label and helper text that explains the expected object type. | Announce new notification arrival with status semantics when appropriate, but avoid interrupting users repeatedly for low-priority center items. | Give the activity feed a heading and expose the current filter, layout, and unread or cleared state in text. | Use labelled tables or grids with column headers for principal, source, role, capability, status, and actions. |
| Common misuse | Treating a mention as an assignment. | Using task list as an answer summary. | Treating review queue as approval workflow and hiding many-item workload controls. | Treating the first approval as final when the rule requires more approvers. | Treating a mention suggestion list as a generic people picker and ignoring caret position, inline serialization, and notification side effects. | Treating the picker as a free text field when the system requires an existing object ID. | Treating the badge count, unread count, and total notification count as one number. | Dumping every low-level system event, presence update, typing event, or cursor movement into the feed. | Showing only direct users while group or inherited access remains active. |