Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Many people are familiar with the newspaper practice of maximising reader interest by placing premium content ‘above the fold’. The design of a newspaper broadsheet requires the paper to be folded leaving the lower half out of site and therefore unreadable at a glance. The notion of the fold has carried over to web design with many developers treating the bottom edge of the screen as a fold, beyond which they assume people will fail to scroll. The status of the fold in web design has been reviewed by several studies and the practice of cramming premium content in to the top of web pages has been called into question.
The fold on the web
Part of the problem with the fold on a web page is that the location of the fold changes from computer to computer and can be different depending on the operating system and browser being used. This means that if developers and advertisers want to use the fold to maximize content, they can only guess at the location of the fold. Some research suggests that the best guess would only accurately locate the fold for 10% of users due to the huge diversity of user systems in operation today.
The modern user
This topic has generated much debate among the web development community and it has been studied fairly thoroughly over the last few years. Studies such as Jakob Nielsen’s “Changes in Web Usability since 1994″, have shown that users routinely scroll down pages and are actually likely to search for content below the fold. Modern computer users, even casual ones, have adapted well to the internet environment and are actually fairly adept at finding information. There is a need to organise web pages in a way that attracts users quickly and the info above can be helpful in this area. If the page is organised well, many users will search the entire page.
Prominent websites such as the BBC and Guardian do not cram all of their information above the fold but instead organise material in such a way as to indicate that there is obviously more content below the fold. Current computer users are accustomed to browsing websites in this manner and the antiquated notion of the fold does not seem to have much of an effect on their internet habits.