On what research are your assumptions based?

1. Even on a blog the content that’s visible without scrolling has a big influence. We recently did a lot of testing around this topic. When a blog article sttarts with some kind of bulleted list or executive summary, more people will scroll and reac the end of the article.

2. Look at any eyetraking research of Google result pages and you’ll see that the top 3 results account for 80% of the viewing.

So yes, the page fold exists. And the content above the fold will influance the incognitive decision wheater you’ll scroll or leave the page.

No, that’s not true. Many people will visit a site knowing, before having seen *any* of its content, that they will scroll. Example: visiting any blog which typically has good comment threads. Another example: GOOG search.

It’s also misleading to characterizing scrolling as a decision as a decision; it’s not a decision, it’s an instinctual reaction.

for me this article is clear about one thing, the important things should be in that 5XXpx, how can we know what is important and what isn’t?

I agree with the Jakob Nielsen comments.

(For a first-time visit. On subsequent visits, the user *may* remember lower parts of the page from previous visits. But note the table on page 47 of “Prioritizing Web Usability” showing that users scroll much less on later visits than during first visits to a given page.)

I notice two extremes in smaller sites. Some fill the top half with pretty graphics, and some fill the screen with multiple columns of information. I’m annoyed by both! I want to see information immediately, but not more than two columns. It’s hard to track between multiple columns.

I’m not trying to transpose experience with newspaper design onto the web. There is a certain line on a web page (Did I say page? Damn, that sounds like paper too!) below which people don’t see the content unless they scroll. This is a fact.

As for the headline: ‘The Myth of the Page Fold’? I personally think it was a poor choice. Sure, headlines can be thought-provoking. But they should never be downright misleading.

Anyway, there’s also a lot of discussion going on about this topic at 2 threads we’ve started on the topic in these LinkedIn Groups:

- User Experience Group

- User Experience Professionals Network

The concept of the fold simply says that some parts of a long page will be initially visible whereas other parts will only become visible after some action on the part of the user (i.e., to scroll). And depending on how much the user scrolls, more or less of the initially invisible part may be revealed.

As you say, there’s plenty of empirical evidence that users sometimes scroll and sometimes don’t. But the key point is that the decision as to whether to reveal more logically has to be made *before* the user takes the step to view the additional parts of the page. This again means that the initially-viewable part of the page has to provide sufficient information scent to convince the user to take this step.

In other words, what’s above the fold impacts the decision whether to view what’s below the fold.

(For a first-time visit. On subsequent visits, the user *may* remember lower parts of the page from previous visits. But note the table on page 47 of “Prioritizing Web Usability” showing that users scroll much less on later visits than during first visits to a given page.)