Gmail: Priority Inbox Is Working; Users Spending 15 Percent Less Time Reading | Hacker News Reader

Gmail: Priority Inbox Is Working; Users Spending 15 Percent Less Time Reading

techcrunch.com

48 pointsmichaelnovati21 comments

"Priority Inbox users spend 15 percent less time reading email than Gmail users who don’t have it turned on."

This could of course be because priority inbox works. It could also be because users that have priority inbox turned on are correlated with users that spend less time reading emails. Or it could be that they never see non-important mails. Or it could be something else entirely.

It's hard to draw bulletproof conclusions form statistics, but easy to use them in marketing.

15% sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

You've got to remember, while you may manage your inbox well (through being wary of who you give your email to and utilising email filters), not everyone does. A lot of people simply give their email to anyone who asks for it, whether it's a family member or a company offering them a 25p-off coupon. Now imagine if that type of person turned on Priority Inbox, and all their personal emails from family and friends instantly popped up to the top, they're quickly going to stop scanning the bottom "Everything else" section as well as they used to, aren't they. I know I did, I only check those email once or twice a day now.

The issue is not whether the claim is plausible or not, but that in fact it is virtually impossible to verify. We know that statistics like this are not true on aggregate, otherwise we would be many times happier, more productive and more intelligent than a generation ago.

"otherwise we would be many times happier, more productive and more intelligent than a generation ago."

Aren't we? I'd argue we're at the very least more productive.

I suppose the comparison is between me and last year's myself, when priority inbox was not turn on. At least I hope so, otherwise it's obviously as you said.

I do have priority inbox on but for me it makes no difference whatsoever because I work with an "inbox zero policy" anyway.

My company makes software for car dealers. Our customers strongly believe that the advice and guidance they provide when someone is buying a car is irreplaceable. They can't envision a future without salespeople.

Priority Inbox is just another example of how machines are getting to understand us better than we understand ourselves. Amazon knows what books I want to read before I've even heard of the author, Google knows that I incorrectly spelled my search query and so returns results for the correct spelling, and Xero figures out how much I've spent on coffee this month without a lot of manual entry. Advice is becoming a commodity.

How are you guys checking your email? I don't have a single unread message in any of my inboxes. That's my system. Under that system, it's hard for me to find use for priority inbox.

Priority Inbox is great for me because it segregates "nice to know but not critical" (sold another copy of BCC, comment on blog, CC charged successfully by one of my dozen service providers) from "attention required" (customer inquiry, metrics hit a yellow alert, Slicehost couldn't charge card and I've got 48 hours to call bank before my business dies). Red alerts, obviously, don't even bother w email.

Why don't you filter those messages out into a label and auto-archive?

Because if it doesn't hit my inbox I'll never see it at all. The archive is great for looking up stuff ("What did I pay for Slicehost last month? Did Mary Smith get a purchase confirmation?"), but not great for push notifications. Non-priority emails in the inbox are, for me, a good compromise in terms of amount of distraction caused per unit of actionable info gained.

I have a bunch of filters setup to archive but also label them as "Skim". So I see in my sidebar when there Skim has unread messages, and I get around to reading them when I have time.

I could just have those filters "Never mark it as important", but those messages are less important than stuff in the not-important part of my inbox. It's stuff like high-volume mailing lists that are never urgent. I'll let Skim go for 2 or 3 days if I'm busy, whereas I like reading all email in my inbox within a couple hours of seeing it.

Google thrives on messy heuristics so it is perhaps unsurprising that they would view the problem from this perspective. I tend to agree with you that optimally all email should be read (and that this is realistically achievable in most cases), in which case the priority inbox feature is just a palliative and not a cure.

Gmail Priority Inbox: Complex algorithmic solution that uses your behavior and ratings to determine which messages are important.

Facebook Messages: Tell us who your friends are -- those messages are important.

Love the contrast, and think each speaks volumes about the company behind it.

Both companies are integrating the other's approach to have a more holistic solution. Facebook prioritizes news messages from your closest friends, by measuring your interaction with them. And of course Google Me is going to be something interesting.

doesn't 15% less time in gmail = 15% less ad clicks for google from gmail?

ok it's not a 1:1 correlation, but I'm sure there's some kind of relationship. there's an intrinsic conflict of interest - the more you make the app convenient to the point the user doesn't need to interact with it as much, the more you hurt your ad revenue.

(that said, I'm sure a dip in revenue from gmail isn't going to end google)

How much time people spend on the site is just one part of the calculation.

See, this feature is something that makes GMail very attractive, which results in a high user influx and loyalty. More users, more views.

Additionally the web interface of the GMail is made so well, that I for instance stopped using my IMAP synced local eMail client, effectively watching their ads more (not really, I'm ad resistant, but I'm exposed).

Then again, remember that Google's objective with their original search home page was to get users OFF of their page as quickly as possible, and they did this by streamlining their engine and serving the most relevant content. In Gmail, the most relevant content are the "priority" emails. I can think of a few ways in which users spending less time in Gmail can earn more revenue for Google both directly in the Gmail client and in the long run across all Google products.

You also have to realize that you're training Google's algorithms to better understand the things that matter to you, so that even though you spend less time reading emails, now they can target ads better, leading to more clicks (and higher bids due to better targetting).

Google doesn't usually consider such things when making their interfaces better. At least according to them. Google was asked when they rolled out Google Instant what impact it has on their ad revenues, and they said something like "it won't bankrupt us, but other than that we don't worry about it when improving thing for users".

By the way, you want an interesting example? Think of the "I'm feeling lucky" button - a search option on their frontpage which completely bypasses any ads. How much lost revenue has Google experienced because of that one small button? Yet they still keep it.

This reminds me of the plentyoffish article that said that that site has purposefully distorted portraits in order to make users spend more time clicking through to profiles...

I guess that's why one company is plentyoffish and the other one is Google.

Wow, thanks for brining that up.

PoF is always trotted out on HN as a scaling success and a model way to run a business. I'd say it's more a story of reaching critical mass and doing a mediocre, but good enough job to keep people from leaving.

It's on my a short list of sites I find actively irritating to use. Given that they trade in potential partners, something I and most others find extremely interesting in and of itself, that's quite a feat.

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