December 7, 2010 at 17:01Priority Inbox saves 15% of the time?
Three months have passed since the introduction of the new feature Priority Inbox to automatically sort important emails.
The Gmail team calls statistics that users who activated Priority Inbox work with mail 15% less time than other users. At the same time, they work with "important" (obviously, according to the algorithms) mail by 43% more time.
These statistics can be trusted or not. If you believe, then you have to admit the next triumph of computer algorithms over human will. Indeed, it becomes beneficial for a person to blindly trust the algorithm without even knowing it.
On the other hand, statistics from Google can easily be challenged. We can say that the Priority Inbox feature is activated by those people who have previously worked with mail less than average. Those same professionals who read hundreds of letters a day and answer dozens of them, while they are afraid to miss something important, have not activated Priority Inbox in any case. Not surprisingly, they spend on average 15% more time reading mail than other users.
One way or another, but Google considers the above statistics to be successful and continues to improve Priority Inbox. Today they introduced a new little feature. Now, when you hover over the importance icon (
) a quick tip is displayed explaining why this letter is important. There are at least three options: 1) because you yourself have marked the letter as important; 2) mainly because of the people participating in the conversation; 3) mainly because of the words in the message.
In addition, user reviews were such that the feature did not respond quickly to manual training, so developers now significantly increased user feedback rates. They promise that the system will learn much faster.
The Gmail team calls statistics that users who activated Priority Inbox work with mail 15% less time than other users. At the same time, they work with "important" (obviously, according to the algorithms) mail by 43% more time.
These statistics can be trusted or not. If you believe, then you have to admit the next triumph of computer algorithms over human will. Indeed, it becomes beneficial for a person to blindly trust the algorithm without even knowing it.
On the other hand, statistics from Google can easily be challenged. We can say that the Priority Inbox feature is activated by those people who have previously worked with mail less than average. Those same professionals who read hundreds of letters a day and answer dozens of them, while they are afraid to miss something important, have not activated Priority Inbox in any case. Not surprisingly, they spend on average 15% more time reading mail than other users.
One way or another, but Google considers the above statistics to be successful and continues to improve Priority Inbox. Today they introduced a new little feature. Now, when you hover over the importance icon (
) a quick tip is displayed explaining why this letter is important. There are at least three options: 1) because you yourself have marked the letter as important; 2) mainly because of the people participating in the conversation; 3) mainly because of the words in the message. In addition, user reviews were such that the feature did not respond quickly to manual training, so developers now significantly increased user feedback rates. They promise that the system will learn much faster.