Comments on Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Damian Stephens — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:33:43 GMT

It’s funny that I’ve found this article now…

I’ve just had to re-design the homepage of an online travel agency so that all the search functionality (navigation, destination input fields, calendar, return / one-way selection, total days, travellers and submit button(s)) fits above the fold for users with 800×600 monitor resolution, despite the fact that only 3.6% of the company’s customers have their monitors set to this resolution – the rest being higher.

interestingly, of all the major OTAs (online travel agencies), only kayak.com attempts to fit the search functionality above the fold for users with 800×600 resolution.

undertaking this exercise made me question whether users with lower resolutions would really be put off using a site if key functionality went below their fold and they had to scroll to complete a task (as long as it was obvious that the functionality continued below the fold), or if they would simply click away (as the CEO feared). in this instance, 800×600 users would only have kayak.com to go to if they really hadn’t mastered the scroll.

it also made me wonder what the impact of having a design compact enough to be viewed within such tight dimensions would be on the majority of users with higher resolutions. i wonder if there are any studies to show the user experience impact of small, fiddly or busy designs on users with large resolution monitors? if we’re talking from a design or branding point of view ‘small’, ‘busy’ and ‘cramped’ aren’t good adjectives.

i have always believed that people with lower resolution monitors must be used to scrolling by now – their experience of the web is by necessity a scrolly one.

Thomas BOUTON — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:13:40 GMT

Hi ! Great article !

I wholeheartedly agree. And now that we have all understood that users scroll, can we also all agree that designing pages for screens at 1024×768 is bad ? I mean, I have an old (but faithful) laptop running at 1024×768 when I am in holidays, my home screen runs 1182×864, my office screen is 1600×1200 and my office laptop is something like 1440×900. With CSS everywhere, why is everybody designing columns with a fixed size ? Right now more than half my screen space is white ! STOP, please, STOP. Do create designs that scale well horizontally too !

Thanks for your attention !

Lee Fuhr — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 01:52:41 GMT

Milissa! Hi! A coworker out here in San Diego just sent this article around the company here. Lo and behold, it’s you :)

Sadly, I don’t have anything to add beyond repeating the “great article” and “I deal with this all the time” and “thank you so much for culling together some actual data” callouts.

(and Quig – hey! Down under, huh?)

Pardon my friendly but useless response…

Victor Agreda Jr — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:03:19 GMT

WOW, this was awesome. That 10% number was good to know, and makes total sense. Does that factor in things like toolbars?
And yeah, for anyone who remembers HTML 1, scrolling was required! I mean, browsing using Archie and the gang required scrolling, Word docs on a 9” Mac screen required scrolling (remember how screen refresh actually made a difference in a document?), and so on. Almost like saying people didn’t know to tab to a new field in Lotus or BIOS settings.
What’s funny is when someone has a 22” monitor at max res and squishes their window down to less than 800×600.
Thanks for this info!
—a fellow AOL’er

Aaron Hemmelgarn — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:18:32 GMT

I tend to have a issue with scrolling too much to find something on a page and tend to like sites that tastefully cram as much of the important content as high as possible on the page. Take this one for a quick example, after clicking on a link that says Rate, I then have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to find a comment box and it appears that I have the ability to Edit, Delete or Ban someone else’s comments…? Why does this have to be all the way at the bottom of the page? It would have been better in opinion to add the comment box at the same point on the page where I clicked Rate the article, so with that being said I think it’s always best practices to tastefully Cram in as much content as possible above the fold.
The Home page is what grabs a users attention and makes them read on further, just as a magazine, newspaper, etc. We here at www.fiswebdesign.com employ the best practices of tastefully cramming in as much content above the fold and will continue to do so.

Sue Quigley — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:47:49 GMT

Howdy from down under! One of my kiwi colleagues forwarded me your article this morning! Congrats on your international reputation : )
Great article. I am still conditioned from my AOL days to be compulsive about keeping things “above the fold”. But it is slowly fading away—leaving me much more space and freedom for designing!
Hope all is well at AOL.

Mariam Ayyash — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:13:07 GMT

Hi, this is all very valuable, I have been trying to convince my clients that people DO SCROLL, but I never had the figures and numbers, thanks a load for the effort….

One more thing to add, I have realized through out my experience with web interfaces, that I scroll down more often becuase of the Mouse Wheel, it is becoming much more convenient to scroll as soon as the page starts loading even before the content is totally ready, just to see if the page is active and there are things to see down there, then I switch away to some other window, and later come back with all determination to dance the page up and down before I settle on a point… I swear, sometimes, if the page does not scroll down, I get disappointed! or worse, feel the browser hanged, or the connection lost! :)
PS. someone mentioned scrolling left-to-right, I believe if we can break the text into columns of adequate width, and invent a mouse wheel that goes right ways, it is possible!

Vera Bass — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:01:43 GMT

This aspect fascinates me as I observe my husband (boomer) and other non-tech casual users’ behavior. Every one of them, including those I introduced to using the web personally, grasped the scroll down function easily, almost intuitively, and use it regularly regardless of whether they are already involved in the content. Yet each of them backs right out from a visual overload without thinking to seek lower. When asked, they’ll say it didn’t occur to them at the time. It appears to me that the ‘too much’ above the fold has far more of an impact than the ‘what’.

Brian Cassidy — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:13:16 GMT

I wouldn’t say that the fold is necessarily a “myth”. It is a real barrier albeit one that has been paved over to more of a speed bump because users have become accustomed over the years to using one of the more simple inherent functions of a browser, the scroll bar. Also, we, as in the UI designers, have no one to blame but ourselves for reinforcing the fold. If we have been responsible designers we are probably doing wireframes to scale (or close to scale) and our Visio templates are set to letter or legal in landscape orientation so that we can (and out clients can) print out our deliverables on regular paper. Our designs then tend to conform to this. We need to break away from this constraint.

As you suggest, keeping functionality away from the fold and to use visual cues to suggest that there is something worthwhile to scroll to, is the key. Again, as responsible designers, we can and should influence all of the folks that depend upon our deliverables – the business owners, visual designers and developers – to remember that the fold is real but not to be afraid of it.

Now, how about the right hand fold? Meaning, scrolling from left to right. Now that is a reality. Is that the next barrier to true freedom?

Tim Beidel — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:11:54 GMT

This kind of information is priceless. Concepts and theory are great, but this kind of solid data helps in the real world that we spend most of our time dealing with.

Check out Apple’s latest Web design – they have dropped a section/site map at the bottom of each page. This kind of information has typically been at the top of the page, usually buried in dropdown or flyout menus. I suspect that it is working well in this spot. (I would be surprised if the breadcrumb is very well understood down there, though. To me, that still belongs at the top of the page. Just instinct – would be nice to know.)

Milissa Tarquini — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:12:04 GMT

Chris – you’ve got it right. The content is the key. If it’s good, users will follow it – and I think they will follow it even if they haven’t been to the site before. The design of the page is important of course, and great design can support that great content. But if the content isn’t good, well, then I certainly hope users aren’t scrolling to see more of it… ;)

Mitch Hazam — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:12:09 GMT

This article is both inspiring and reassuring. The hardest part of web design and user interface design has been convincing people (clients, product owners) that users will flow through content if the design is compelling; just like someone working their way through a newspaper or analyzing a great painting or sculpture. Design is meant to stimulate and guide the user to the desired end result. The fold has always been considered a brick wall to many designers and this insightful study of how the users are really investigating the web helps to tear down the wall. I do hope everyone prints this out and mysteriously places it on the desk of any client or product owner :)

Great article.

chris ratzlaff — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:13:39 GMT

Very interesting research, but it would seem to me that it applies more to sites where users have already bought into the product (AOL, news/news aggregator sites, a favorite blog, etc). If users are still evaluating the product (a news site they are looking at for the first time or a site for a company they are consider purchasing something from), they may not be convinced to scroll down if the content above the fold isn’t useful to them.

I don’t think the issue is so much that users don’t know how to scroll anymore than readers not knowing how to flip over a newspaper. The issue is using the content above the fold to *convince* them to buy into and *flip* that newspaper.

Almar van der Krogt — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:13:23 GMT

Very useful and elaborate article. I referenced to it from my latest blogpost (see http://www.almarvanderkrogt.nl/blog/archives/2007/07/plai…).

Lar Veale — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 16:49:39 GMT

Really like the article. In user testing, we still see some issues with visual cues that indicate the end of the page (like a horizontal line or too much white space).

On your question, “where is the fold”, there’s a new niche analytics application called FoldSpy (foldspy.com) which is worth looking into. They measure the exact fold size rather than screen resolution so you can see what percentage of your visitors can see what and use that to determine where you should be placing important content.

Lar