Users Spend 15 Percent Less Time in Gmail with Priority Inbox Enabled

A couple of months ago Google introduced the Priority Inbox in Gmail. Priority Inbox tries to determine which emails are important and which aren't to make it easier to sift through a large number of messages. It's a first step towards a curated inbox and Google is now introducing a couple of small updates to the feature.

Google also revealed that people with Priority Inbox enabled spend less time reading emails but that they spend a lot more time with the messages deemed important by Gmail.

"Looking at median time in conversation view, we noticed that typical Priority Inbox users spend 43% more time reading important mail compared to unimportant, and 15% less time reading email overall as compared to Gmail users who don’t use Priority Inbox," Pal Takacsi-Nagy, Engineering Manager at Google, wrote.

The numbers are impressive especially at the scale Gmail works. There should be millions of Gmail users with Priority Inbox enabled, so a 15 percent reduction in time spent with the service is a significant improvement.

"One thing we heard is that you wanted to know why Gmail classifies certain messages as important," Takacsi-Nagy explained. You can now see why Gmail labeled the email messages as important by hovering over the "importance marker."

There is no single reason why an email is deemed important, Gmail relies on several factors, but the biggest one is displayed, things like "you often read messages with this label" or "because of the people in the conversation."

"You also told us that you thought Priority Inbox didn’t learn fast enough, so we've made it much more responsive to your manual corrections," Google added.  This adjustment should mean that email messages you tagged as unimportant should find it harder to make their way into the Priority Inbox and the other way around.

Google is not done optimizing Priority Inbox and is asking users for suggestions, either for changes or new features, via the new Product Ideas page created for Gmail's Priority Inbox.