Digital Origami: Reconsidering the "Above the Fold"

When I worked for a newspaper, how things were organized on the front page was a big deal. It was the first part of the paper people saw when they walked past display stands.

On some of those display stands, the paper was folded in half, with just the top half showing. The result was that passers by would only see what was "above the fold." So like every other paper on the newsstand, our best and most engaging stuff had to be above the fold.

Over the course of many decades, this strategy become an institutional obsession. Publishers who weren't obsessed with it, didn't sell a lot of papers. So when newspapers moved to the Web, this obsession carried through. The thinking went that if users didn't see what they wanted on the screen as soon as they landed on a site, they would leave. And so "above the fold" was extended to the digital realm, referring to the portions of a webpage that are visible without scrolling.

Above the Fold - Sample Page Views: An animation showing the way screen resolution and aspect can change where the fold is on a site.This reasoning seemed, well reasonable, but it was based on the premise that print reading habits carried over to the new media. Over the past 15 years however, new habits have developed. People have gotten used to doing things on the Web that could never be done with traditional print. They've gotten used to the idea of scrolling down to find what they're looking for.

Please, Go On

One thing a web page can do, that a print page can't, is go on forever. This opens up a lot of space for content. Some sites abuse this idea, leaving you to scroll endlessly. The big problem with those sites is that their content is poorly organized. Other sites haven't quite caught on yet and try to cram as much as possible "above the fold," which leads to poor design, and untimately confusion.

Between those two extremes is a happy medium. As far back as 1997, researcher Jakob Nielsen reported that "pages that can be markedly improved with a scrolling design may be made as long as necessary, though it should be a rare exception to go beyond three screenfulls on an average monitor."

In 2006, ClickTale did more than a little research on scrolling behavior and declared: "Visitors are equally likely to scan almost the entire page (more than 90%) no matter the page size."

And just back in September of this year, the British firm CX Partners published some great results using an eye tracker that shows quite clearly that a well designed page will draw people down into the below the fold content.

Old habits die hard, and we regularly hear from clients who worry about the length of pages. Fortunately, these worries are largely unfounded. So rather than trying to fold their content into artistic shapes, we tell them to concentrate on more mundane matters, like producing content that compels people to use their mouse.