Below the Fold?

I recently read an article by Clicktale called "Unfolding the Fold". Clicktale are a web stats and usability group that specialise in monitoring web users beyond the normal hits/visitor approach. They actually let their customers watch every action a visitor takes on their site, by recording movies of each visitors actions, these films show hotspots, where the mouse hovers and how a visitor navigates and interacts with the site. In its own right, a great service, though I'm not writing to sell it.

In the years that we've been working on the web, we used to work hard to make sure that content remained above the fold. This refers back to the broadsheet newspaper, where the biggest and most important headline gets the top of the page and content that went below the fold was considered second rate news. The same applied to the web, as with lots of new media, the web took this at face value and many sites were originally designed to be able to present all the information without scrolling anywhere.

Clicktale has now given us some great evidence that this is no longer the case. From Nov-Dec last year Clicktale studied 120,000+ page views and their habits and I quote :

• 91% of the page-views had a scroll-bar.
• 76% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled to some extent.
• 22% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled all the way to the bottom.

"These statistics demonstrate that the vast majority of web designers are designing pages with scrolling, that the majority of users do scroll and that a significant portion of them scroll all the way to the page bottom. While 22% may seem low at first, it is actually quite high as many page-views are repeat views where the visitors have previously scrolled all the way to the page bottom and are already familiar with the page. In addition, visitors often find what they are looking for near the beginning of the page and may not bother scrolling further down. "

I think this change has come about from a few different areas. The phenomenon of social content sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg etc are all based on people commenting (and submitting) on the content that's shared by that online community. In Digg's case, a bunch of people submit stories from (mostly) traditional media sources and the ones deemed most interesting are voted to the front page. Where the interaction comes are peoples views on the stories, so the commenting, much like on a forum, runs on and on down the page. For people to interact, they need to scroll down the page.

So, summing up from this....utilise space, the more space around content is a great way to make a site feel bigger and 'roomier'. Don't get caught up on resolution and screen size and don't try and squeeze the content into the top of the page!

Have a great week....
Mark

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