Our users open the same document 11 times before editing it.

We tracked document open events across 400,000 sessions over 90 days.

Median opens before first edit: 11
Median time between first open and first edit: 3 days 4 hours
Users who opened once and never edited: 44%
Users who opened 10+ times before editing: 31%

People were not opening documents to work on them. They were opening them to check, reference, or remind themselves. The document was a place they visited, not a place they worked. Our editor was optimized for the moment of editing — toolbar, formatting, collaboration — and had nothing for the 11 visits before that.

We added a lightweight "preview mode" that loaded in 400ms and showed a read-only view with a single "Edit" button. Time to first edit dropped to 1 day 9 hours, and documents that were never edited dropped from 44% to 28%.

What are your users doing repeatedly before they do the thing you designed for, and have you built for the before?