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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Is “above the fold” design dead?

Is “above the fold” design dead?

A newspaper in a rack displaying only the content above the foldConventional wisdom among designers led to most early websites contained in a horizontal rectangle that required no scrolling. Employing an old newspaper concept, designers resisted putting any content “below the fold,” or beyond the bottom of the visible browser window, since readers didn’t scroll. If you wanted your content to be seen, it needed to be above the fold.

There is a growing consensus that those days are over. The once-valid reasons for keeping content on a single screen and using hyperlinks to reveal deeper layers of content are no longer much of a concern.

There are still below-the-fold issues to keep in mind. Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen reported in 2010 that multiple studies showed that users spend 80% of their time on a page viewing content above the fold. While they do scroll (Nielsen retracted his no-scrolling advice in 1997), they give up only 20% of their attention to content below the fold. Long pages, he wrote, “continue to be a problem because of users’ limited attention span. People prefer sites that get to the point and let them get things done quickly.”

For longer content, though, Nielsen said scrolling beats clicking through to other pages, since it’s “easier for users to simply keep going down the page than it is to decide whether or not to click through for the next page of a fragmented article.”

A test of 48 participants by an international design firm offered four different designs on pages that all required scrolling: one with no visual cues letting the user know to scroll, one with a scroll arrow, one featuring a short image that required scrolling to see the rest of it, and one with an animated image that used motion to guide viewers below the fold. The researchers found that users scrolled regardless of the design, and about 90% of them scrolled immediately.

Just to complicate matters, consider research that revealed moving the call to action below the fold can increase conversions from 20% to more than 300%. According to KissMetrics’ Bnonn Tennant, “Higher conversion rates have nothing to do with whether the button is above the fold, and everything to do with whether the button is below the right amount of good copy.”

Even those designers who decry the fact that too many sites cling to the above-the-fold approach admit that the most important stuff should be on the part of the page that’s initially visible. But there are so many variables these days, there’s just no answer that covers every possibility. Responsive design is one wrinkle, in which pages work on large computer monitors and small smartphones, where nobody has an issue with scrolling.

Some sites have adopted the “endless scrolling” approach, where content loads continuously as the user scrolls down the page. As recently as this past February, Nielsen advised against this for sites with “goal-oriented finding tasks,” like anything that requires people to find specific content or compare options.

Parallax sites represent another popular approach these days. This technique creates an awareness of motion, in which the objects closest to you seem to move more quickly than those in the background. (Here’s a demo of a parallax scrolling website.) The parallax approach has taken root in all kinds of sites, supported by a range of WordPress themes. Even PR agencies have embraced the concept.

Parallax scrolling website example: Space Needle
A great example of a parallax scrolling site that starts at the bottom of the page. Note the design
element alerting visitors to scroll upward.

As cool as the effect may be, and as willing as users are to scroll these days, there are other issues with parallax design, mainly that it can compromise SEO. A parallax page is, after all, just a single page that can’t accommodate “multiple H1 headers, separate title tags, and meta descriptions,” according to a ClickZ article. It’s also hard to optimize for key words and the sites are not particularly mobile-friendly.

Ultimately, arguing that above or below the fold is universally good or bad is as ridiculous as arguing that printed material should all be in tabloid format or none should be. It depends on your goals, your audience, the nature of your content, and a host of other factors. The research tells us that we shouldn’t be afraid of putting content below the fold. Beyond that, be strategic in your approach rather than trendy.

(Flickr photo courtesy of Infrogmation of New Orleans)

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