The Page Fold is No Myth
The folks at cxpartners recently conducted a study on the tendency for visitors to scroll a web page. The article can be found here While the study is very encouraging, I can’t say I totally agree with some of the conclusions.
A quick snoop around the web will show you successful brands that are not worrying about the fold either.
I would argue that successful brands *do* care about the fold. While they do place content “below the fold”, this does not imply that they place the same value on real estate “below the fold”, as they do real estate “above the fold”. NYT.com surely won’t put their top story below the fold, or Amazon their Kindle 3 announcement. Similarly, you’re not going to see a supermarket put the healthy cereal at a child’s eye level, or Best Buy put the Playstation 4 in the back of the store.
The surprising thing we learnt was that actually having less above the fold (one large content block as opposed to 2 smaller ones) encouraged exploration below the fold.
Sure, by placing less valuable content above the fold, you’re likely to compel more people to scroll. However, I’d argue that less people *overall* would find that content than if it were “above the fold”. The experiment really only tells us that putting interesting content below the fold compelled some set of people scroll to find it. It doesn’t tell you if Bristol Airport saw the same response rate for the content in both positions. I’d be curious to know if they could clarify this.
I think the whole “above the fold” discussion is a bit futile. Content that is not in immediate view is always going to be viewed less than content in immediate view especially if an extra action is needed to view it, such as scrolling. It’s not really about the “fold”. It’s about how much effort is needed to reach the content. Nonetheless, the study is very encouraging. It’s great to see that the tendency for people to explore “below the fold” is increasing. This is great news for the long tail. However, I don’t think we’re quite ready to call it even.
