#fold (15 links)
People will look very far down a page if (a) the layout encourages scanning, and (b) the initially viewable information makes them believe that it will be worth their time to scroll.
- Life Below 600px | I Am Paddy iampaddy.com
The fold is one of those guidelines that has been thrown about so much that it's now become a 'rule' of web design (or maybe more appropriately a 'ball and chain' of web design) with web designers blindly obeying without question.
- Google Code Blog: Introducing Google Browser Size googlecode.blogspot.com
I'm not sure I approve.
"Even today, people will cite the ancient, irrelevant rule of The Fold as if it's still law. In fact, I was just talking to a friend of mine who expressed his frustration at dealing with a middle manager who was using the "content must be above the fold" rule as a weapon, and demanding that all page content appear above the fold. It's terribly misguided."
When all the sections end evenly on the page, users subconsciously decide there isn’t anything else to look for and don’t try to scroll. Of course, if they don’t scroll, they miss important content, such as the list of products.
One of the most significant findings of our research on web-site usability is 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.
- Blasting the Myth of the Fold - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design boxesandarrows.com · Archived on
"Jeff Parks [and] Milissa Tarquini [...] talk about how this long held rule in web design is being de-bunked by web analytics and user testing, as well as how this will impact design and development processes based on screen resolution and browser compati
- ClickTale Blog » ClickTale Scrolling Research Report V2.0 - Part 1: Visibility and Scroll Reach blog.clicktale.com · Archived on
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.
- Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease » Blog Archive » IA for beginners: long pages work. poorbuthappy.com
"Scrolling works. Long pages work. Anything else tends to be informationarchitecturitis (which I define as “the practice of adding too much structure when it’s not needed and even gets in the way”)." But not all the time, naturally.
"In this post, we will demonstrate with charts and real data several behavioral patterns related to scrolling." No such thing as the fold - useful background for this POV.
Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.
- Actual Browser Sizes (final) - Baekdal.com baekdal.com
In order to support 95% of your visitors, you need to design for a maximum size of 776x424px.