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Blasting the Myth of the Fold

July 29th, 2007

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There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 5:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Blasting the Myth of the Fold”

  1. Douglas Karr Says:
    July 29th, 2007 at 11:50 am

    IMHO, with RSS it’s a myth… with a Web Page it’s a maybe… and with HTML Email I think it’s still important.

    There are specific elements of a web page you don’t want to trust someone to scroll to.

  2. Ian Says:
    July 30th, 2007 at 9:03 am

    I think the advent of the mouse wheel really helped things along here. It’s a fantastic invention.

  3. Douglas Karr Says:
    July 30th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    Here’s some info on email and ‘above the fold’ vs ‘below it’: http://blog.eyetools.net/eyetools_research/2007/07/eyetracking-cir.html

  4. Teresa Hernandez Says:
    August 23rd, 2007 at 5:11 pm

    A quick clarification on email/webpage-scrolling (in general), and the Circuit City example (specifically)… In our studies at Eyetools (www.eyetool.com), we have observed that users are very willing to scroll several screen lengths down a page that is 1- informative and 2- easy to scan.

    True, most users won’t read all of the content in pages that are 6+ screen scrolls long. And as you might expect, almost no one reads the small print at the bottom of online content. However, many times we see designs that assume users don’t scroll, and effectively “give up” on trying to capture attention in the lower half of the page. It’s important to stress that the design elements and copy throughout the page can be used to communicate critical information.

    The Circuit City email was an example of an email format that is very commonly used by large retailers. This specific format performs very poorly in the vast majority of our tests. Just as a note, viewing below the fold is poor here because the design did not guide the user’s eyes effectively… not because users didn’t scroll. Even in this example, 50% of users scrolled at least 2 screen lengths, and 33% got most of the way through. Improving the template would greatly improve scrolling as well as read-through.

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