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.

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