Pilot Study

My hypotheses are as follows:
1. If a random delay between 0-2 seconds is introduced before a page loads for a non-essential website (i.e. site that is being visited for recreation purposes only), users will spend longer amounts of time before visiting that site again, and the "visit delay" will be directly correlated with the previous delay length (perhaps as a markov process, with the previous N delay lengths).
2. The longer a non-essential website takes to load, the more likely users will be to close the tab before the page finishes loading.

Methodology
For my pilot study I wanted to test how introducing a 2 second delay every time a certain subset of websites was visited would change the web browsing experience. I implemented this on myself. I found myself annoyed by the delay at first, but not so annoyed that I considered disabling the feature or opening an incognito window (where it would have been disabled). I quickly got used to it. I also noticed that my overall browsing of those sites went down a little bit, though this might be due to many other reasons. For example, yesterday I was getting ready to procrastinate but then a wasp flew into my room so I got scared and fled with my laptop. I fled all the way to Meyer, and then being in Meyer I felt guilty about goofing off on the internet with all these studious people around me so I just studied. The conclusion of my brief pilot study is that the extension will not be intrusive for users to the point that they significantly alter their behavior, but may be effective enough to change behavior in subtle ways.

Results!
With the extension (2 days data, Wednesday and Thursday):
23 total visits to facebook
151 total visits to reddit

Without the extension (2 days data, Monday and Tuesday)
59 total visits to facebook
145 total visits to reddit

My overall browsing on reddit went up, but that was mostly due to a reddit binge at the end when all my work was actually done so I was allowed to. Without that the total visits to reddit was 97. I did not measure the time in between visits. I have this data but I have not yet compiled it in any meaningful way.

The results themselves are not very meaningful, but the main takeaway was that the extension does not pose any major obstacles or problems that would significantly alter what I am trying to test; that is, subtly influencing human behavior. I didn't think it would be meaningful at this point to perform statistical tests on them due to the extremely low amount of data and the fact that the circumstances of data collection in both trials was so different. The pilot experiment mostly served as a sanity check on the viability of the extension and the experiment.