Quiet line

Pull the shade down over the wall. What it covers goes quiet; an alarm still gets through.

Sixteen support queues, live. The shade says what it covers in one line; a covered queue that crosses its alarm rises out of it until you acknowledge it. Pull it all the way down.

Sixteen support queues, all ticking. Most of them are fine most of the time, and they still pull at your eye.

Grab the tab on the shade and pull it down the wall. Queues under it stop updating, and the shade prints what it’s covering: how many are steady, how many people are waiting across them, the longest wait. Keep going and the whole wall becomes one sentence.

Then leave it for a few seconds. When a covered queue crosses its alarm, it comes up out of the shade and stays up until you acknowledge it. The shade never says something needs you unless that row is standing in front of it.

That last rule is the one I’d fight for in a real tool. Hiding noise is easy. Making quiet trustworthy is the hard part, so the shade keeps counting, and you can always see how much of the wall it covers. More on the people this is for in Designing for operators.