Lee McIvor

I’ve just had a meeting where the age-old issue of the “fold” was raised. Much has been written about this elsewhere over the last few years, but while it’s still being raised fairly regularly I think it’s worth maybe just restating some of the issues again.

Milissa Tarquini tried to effectively summarise the matter in her Boxes and Arrows article “The myth of the fold”, and for some that was that. Her article was well-balanced and didn’t entirely discount the relevance of the fold on the web, but perhaps the title of the article sounded more damning than the content.

Basically it isn’t a myth, and it does matter, in certain contexts. In the original sense that I still hear too often, that everything should be above the fold because users will not scroll, it really is a myth. However, in the sense that users need visual cues to indicate that important content lies beneath the fold, it’s true. To be more clear, there are two aspects to this question.

Is the concept of “the fold” a myth? No. Do users scroll? Yes, if there’s a reason to.

Jared Spool also wrote an excellent piece on dealing with the fold back in 2006 which is worth reading for anyone who missed it.

So where is the fold? Well, in these times of varying browsing devices with varying screen sizes, we just don’t know where it is on a web page. What I see on my iPhone screen is different from a 24″ widescreen monitor, which is different from a 13″ laptop monitor. The next question is, does its existence affect the browsing habits of web users?

If a user is looking at some aspect of a page that starts above the fold, and finishes below it, then usually that will give a good visual indication that you need to scroll to see the entire content. Take the page you’re reading now as an example. Unless you have a truly gigantic browsing window, or a very short one, you can pretty clearly see at all times whether you’ve reached the end or not. So in cases such as this (which in my experience are very common) then users can generally recognise the need to scroll, and have no problem doing so.

On the other hand, if you have page content that doesn’t provide any visual cues that it continues beyond the fold, wherever that may be, then you are more likely to find users fail to scroll to that additional content. I’ve seen this through usability testing on many occasions. CX Partners have also published a recent blog post which provides some further evidence on this issue.

Of course without knowing the exact location of the fold it’s impossible to provide visual cues for every possible position, but most web pages already have content areas that begin and end at different vertical points within that page. Most problems in this area arise when you try to deliberately design to keep content above a specific identified height.

So in a nutshell, the fold isn’t a myth, but that doesn’t mean users don’t scroll. The key thing of course is that the truth about what users do is different in each situation. So if in doubt, why not get some real users and test it…?