The fallacy of ‘the fold’: part two

Even if we had a universal, predictable fold on the web, it might not even be of that much use anyway.

In part one of this article, I discussed the concept of the fold from a physical point of view, and how its position relative to page content can vary hugely. However, there’s another set of reasons why the fold is simply less relevant when applied to the web, as opposed to print.

Recall how the fold originates from a newspaper, physically folded in half. Displayed on a news stand, this top half is usually visible, and its content is king. By contrast, the lower half of that front page is almost irrelevant: once a reader sees it, they’ve probably already bought the paper.

But just how well does this metaphor translate to the web?

Users scroll

Clicktale’s research tells us that users do actually scroll on the web, despite what you may have heard. As far back as 1997, Jakob Nielsen was saying the same thing. The popularity of the scroll wheel has certainly encouraged scrolling, and there’s much less effort involved in moving a web page than picking up and flipping over a newspaper. Scrolling is also a trivial, and flexible, action for keyboard users.

Where is a web page, anyway?

Newspapers are stored for sale, generally, in a big pile. Lots of different newspapers lie side by side, competing for our attention. Web pages, on the other hand, are displayed in isolation. When you’re viewing a page, you’re doing just that: viewing a page. Remember, your page is not competing with a multitude of others at this point; that happened at a much earlier stage, when someone decided whether to follow a link to your site or not.

Once a user is viewing your page, elements on that page are competing with each other, not with those of other pages. In many ways, this gives you much tighter control of the audience — give them something that catches their attention, or piques their interest, and they’ll follow that up.

What’s an article without scrolling?

Imagine a site developed to ‘ensure’, with as great a chance as possible (i.e. not much), that each page is just a single page: the nirvana of absent scrolling. What would your impression of such a site be? After viewing a few pages, you might draw the conclusion that no page will offer that much information. Whether it’s a product page, a comment thread, or an article, there’s not much going on.

To ensure such a site layout, the temptation might be to break articles up into small chunks, linking them together. This is a terrible idea, for the following reasons:

However well you label page numbers, new users will need to put more cognitive effort into finding out how long the article is
However well you display pages, users will need to put more effort into moving around the article
Automated parsing of those articles becomes far more difficult. For this reason, SEO will suffer. It will also be more difficult to restructure your article, should you ever need to.

Conclusion

All-in-all, it seems a bad idea to rashly overestimate the importance of ‘the fold’. Be aware that folds vary, don’t behave on the web as they do in print, and will only decrease in ‘value’ over time.

Comments

Sat 28 Nov 2009 18:20

pdxWebDr said:

I think the relevance of designing with the fold in mind is providing an immediate sense of place and purpose. Leaving elements critical to answering the question "what is this?" below the fold is poor design.

Of course, on the other side, a good top-down hierarchical design will not make this mistake, anyway — I think this rule is handy for people who have gigantic logos and huge amounts of wasted space in their headers.

If you’re pertaining to an extreme dogma like "no scrolling", though, you've got bigger problems than this.