The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing

[elblanco]

The heat maps of eye movement were fascinating...I noticed the almost complete lack of activity on the advertisements immediately. Users appear to do what I do, just simply ignore them or try and filter them out.

[ams6110]

What I noticed was that most of the attention was between the left side and center of the page. The only attention point on the right side was the scroll bar. Made me think of the NEXTSTEP window manager where the scroll bars were on the left. The explanation at the time for this apparent deviation from the "standard" was that it kept the scroll bar closer to the user's primary attention areas on the page.

In Mac OS X i guess Apple caved to popular convention and moved the scroll bars to the right.

[ahoyhere]

It's called "ad blindness," a well-known problem. That's why I don't even bother to put ads on my sites.

People also ignore anything in colored blocks, or that looks like an ad.

Thus ReCaptcha had a huge problem initially with people just "not seeing" it on the forms where it was placed. It looked like an ad.

[btn]

The lack of detail in what their users were actually doing on the sites they tested makes it hard to tell what they're trying to dispel.

If you're giving users a specific task to perform on a specific website in a controlled environment, then of course scrolling isn't going to deter them. The argument against scrolling is that if you're trying to attract users to your site---to pick your site over other potential sites---then scrolling will be a factor when people want to make a quick decision if your site is useful or not.

[ubernostrum]

Well, this is really the problem. The fold really only becomes a huge factor when you're trying to win someone's attention in that snap "does this site have what I need" judgment; once the user's mind is made up that, yes, this is the right place, it becomes largely irrelevant.

But somewhere along the line, a useful guideline for getting people to stick around and explore a page or a site morphed into a hard rule of "never have anything at all below the fold, ever". Which is frankly stupid.

[ams6110]

They also didn't mention horizontal scrolling, which I personally cannot stand. Vertical scrolling is not nearly as objectionable, though in forms it's more of a bother than on pages where you are just reading.

[JDigital]

Jakob Nielsen helped to popularize the myth that web users don't scroll down. It led to an era of website design that crammed as much onto one page, leading to busy, crowded homepages. It wasn't until later that early adopters of CSS made websites simple again, in part to avoid compatibility issues with Internet Explorer.

[alabut]

I'd rather blame people that took his advice to extremes and tried to shove everything above the fold, which isn't what he advocated, just to add the most important stuff up top:

"Is all key information visible above the fold so users can see it without scrolling?"

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html

[jfarmer]

Maybe, maybe not. What would be interesting is a longitudinal study about this.

I can believe that ten years ago people didn't scroll, but instead our behavior changed over time as we adapted to the medium.

So, ten years ago "users don't scroll" was good advice, but designers made the mistake of filing that away in the Known Fact bin without reflecting more carefully and/or actually testing it.

Just a hypothesis.

[req2]

I'm curious as to what their test protocol is that it has dispelled every other posting on this topic. A person told to buy shoes at Amazon.com isn't going to be stifled by a scrollbar, but someone who isn't being directly told to interact with the website in a given manner doesn't seem as likely to scroll down looking for content that isn't found on a sparsely populated top page.

(Related: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/word-matching.html)

[patio11]

Somebody forgot to send my users the memo, apparently.

[req2]

I'm sad to see that no one else has upvoted you; you seem to be the only one here that has had the experience to weigh in on the issue.

[KarlGilis]

Whether users want to scroll or not, depends from situation to situation. Visitors will not always scroll. So it's not just a myth.

It depends on the type of page and the type of website.

A nice article illustrating when users want to scroll (and when not) can be found at http://webusability-blog.com/page-fold-fact-or-fiction/. It also gives some good examples of good use of the area above the page fold.

[maudineormsby]

Worth noting that while you can have content below the fold and signal to users to find it, that's not true with branding and identity features - those should be prominent and above the fold.

Further, as a commenter on the article pointed out, there's benefit in identifying your audience. Someone on NYT is obviously willing to scroll. Can the same really be said of someone shopping for a luxury car and looking to be wowed?

[hussong]

Looks like the 'Holy Scrollers' have won, while the 'Sharks' (everything in one bite) are left to chew on their hypercard metaphor.

[lurkinggrue]

Yeah, what about the scroll-wheel? I hardly ever touch the scroll bars anymore.