Why the “Fold” Doesn’t Matter Anymore

At a recent meeting of the NHUPA, Will Powley from Mad*Pow gave a 10-minute presentation called “Newspapers Have Folds, Websites Do Not“. In this presentation, a study by ClickTale was mentioned in support of the notion that the “fold” should no longer be a primary concern for designers.

For anyone who may not be aware, the fold is the point at which a web page extends off the screen and the user is forced to scroll down in order to see more. ClickTale started with some preliminary research and later published two articles summarizing the results of the main study. The preliminary research revealed that:

• 91% of the page views were long enough to contain a scroll-bar. Of those, 76% were scrolled to some extent.
• 22% of the page views with a scroll-bar were scrolled all the way to the bottom.
• Visitors are equally likely to scan the entire page no matter the page size.
• The fold is not a single location, but a broadly dispersed distribution with three peaks located at roughly 430, 600 and 860 pixels.

The results of the more detailed study by ClickTale yielded the following insights & recommendations:

• Visitors scroll in a relative way – about the same percentage of page views will reach the middle of a web page regardless of the actual page height in pixels.
• Visitors appear to be using the location of the scroll bar but not the size of the tracker when scrolling, since the scroll bar location is a relative indicator and the scroll tracker size is an indicator of page height.
• The most valuable web page real-estate is located near the page top, between 0 and 800 pixels. Visitor Attention and Page Exposure peak at about the 540 pixel-line.
• If you have a long web page,  add “stop points” such as headers and images to prevent your visitors from quickly scrolling down the page. It will prevent their attention from waning towards the end of the page.
• The footer of your page is important! Users do pay quite a bit of attention to that area of your page.

Jakob Nielsen, when discussing changes in web usability from 1994 to 1997, states that “this change in behavior is probably due to users getting more experience with scrolling Web pages.” However, I suspect that it had much more to do with hardware than with users developing better motor skills. Standard mice come with a scroll wheel and many laptops have touch pads with a specific area devoted to scrolling. Touch screens are relatively new and also make scrolling very simple. My personal opinion is that scrolling is infinitely preferable to waiting for a new page to load.

Based on research by UIE, Jared Spool suggests that “users are perfectly willing to scroll. However, they’ll only do it if the page gives them strong clues that scrolling will help them find what they’re looking for.” He thus suggests using a “cut-off” appearance to indicate that a page continues below the fold – common sense and good advice.

So what does all of this mean for web designers?

• First, stop worrying so much about keeping things above the fold. Prioritize information on a page as you normally would, just don’t feel obligated to force it all into a small space.
• But more importantly: widespread changes in user behavior are, at least in part, contingent upon the hardware they use.

If pointing devices with intuitively simple side-scrolling are standard-issue for everyone buying new computers, will web designers finally be able to unleash their creativity in a horizontal direction? Of course people have already designed excellent examples of side-scrolling websites. But if we knew that horizontal scrolling was as easy for users as vertical scrolling, how much more inclined would we be to experiment with that, and perhaps reveal advantages it may have over other methods of presentation?