Above the Fold — The Myth that Hurts

Source: www.cxpartners.co.uk

Most of web devel­op­ers were ‘raised’ know­ing that there is a bar­rier that users usu­ally don’t pass, espe­cially on front-pages. This bar­rier is called The Fold or The Crease and is it the ini­tial screen that the users see with­out scrolling the page.

I will try to show you that this myth is noth­ing but a myth, peo­ple do scroll, and The Fold does not actu­ally exists, It exists only in the minds of peo­ple who are mis­in­formed, and une­d­u­cated about user behav­ior on the web.

I’ve always had my sus­pi­cions regard­ing this invis­i­ble bar­rier, and not really believed it existed. Scrolling 15 years ago may have been a com­pli­cated task — Move the mouse to the far right of the win­dow, catch the han­dle bar, drag it. or some­times click­ing repeat­edly the down arrow at the bot­tom end of scroll-bar. but we’re not in 1995, and the cheap­est mouse comes with scroll wheel, and on touch­pads you have either multi-touch or drag­ging on a des­ig­nated area to scroll (right-most part of the touch-pad).

Peo­ple are used to scroll, they do it with­out think­ing, it’s even eas­ier than click­ing, you just scroll down the scroll-wheel on your mouse, and it works.

From my own obser­va­tions watch­ing peo­ple using a com­puter and surf the web I’ve noticed that even the novice users usu­ally get the con­cept of scrolling using the scroll-wheel pretty fast, and are almost always ‘check­ing out’ the entire page even if they have decided what they want to do already, but they still take a sec­ond to scroll down and up quickly to see if they’re not miss­ing any­thing. So I’ve started to notice that this bar­rier doesn’t actu­ally exist, peo­ple do tend to search for the thing they want, and if they don’t see it above the fold on the front-page, they will scroll or nav­i­gate to a more rel­e­vant page.

Usabil­ity experts are start­ing to notice that too. Three years ago Click­Tale ana­lyzed 120,000 page-views and dis­cover that 91% of the pages had scroll-bars, 76% of the page-views with a scroll-bar were scrolled. That’s a huge num­ber, that means 3 out of 4 peo­ple scrolls! Not only that, but 22% of the page-views with a scroll-bar were scrolled all the way to the bot­tom. This is huge, every 4th per­son scrolling the page all the way to the bottom.

If you’re think­ing right now “it’s only 3 out of 4, I want all 4 to see every­thing!”, than you’re think­ing wrong. The 25% of the view­ers who are not scrolling your site, is prob­a­bly very very close to your bounce rate. That means your users who do not scroll, are actu­ally not inter­ested in your site, and that’s OK.

Try­ing to cram more and more infor­ma­tion to your front-page to allow all the users to see what you offer them causes infor­ma­tion over­load, and will prob­a­bly make the users that are inter­ested in what you offer them con­fused and uncomfortable.

This is not only how much infor­ma­tion is given to the user, but more of a how the infor­ma­tion is dis­played, cram­ming more and more infor­ma­tion on the front-page causes things to look not so great, even with good design.

The Front-Page should give a taste of what the site offers, and don’t try to show every­thing, show the impor­tant parts, show what you really want the user to know at first glance, and try to con­vey that you have much more to offer (if you do).

Find­ings

CX Part­ners con­ducted a test on Sep­tem­ber 2009 using eye tracker and found that the scroll-bars are used to assess the length of the page, indi­cate that there is more con­tent below the fold.

One of the most com­mon things we see on a heatmap is a strong hotspot over the scroll­bar. The scroll­bar is used to assess the page length. Users expect to have to scroll. The heatmap below shows this.

Scroll-bars are very inter­st­ing to the users

This shows that users rely on the scroll-bar to tell them if there is more con­tent, and get a feel­ing of how long the page is.

More over, less con­tent above the fold encour­ages users to scroll down and explore the page and the entire site. If done right, design­ing the front page that will make the user more inclined to stay and explore.

In this example:

and the user is not inter­ested in the first place, in any case you are going to lose him. cram­ming more data and infor­ma­tion to the front page will only frust