The Continuing Myth of the Fold
November 4, 2011 -
There are three words I hear often in client meetings that always make me cringe, three words that need not ever be uttered again–never, ever again. But yet they’re uttered. And I’m still cringing.
Those words: “Above the fold.”
It was a myth that I thought had been debunked and sent to the annals of history, a myth never to be repeated. But every year, even in the high-tech times of 2011, just a year shy of the world’s supposed demise, I still hear the myth.
For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of the fold, it’s a belief that people will pay the most attention to what’s printed on the front page a newspaper. Perhaps that’s still true–I don’t know, I’m not a newspaper publisher–but somehow this belief got translated over to the nets. People believed with conviction that everything on their homepage had to be jammed all the way to the top, that no one would scroll down below. So in the early times of the internet, designers complied and shoved navigation, headlines, links, content, and ads all the way to the top, and you’d look at these websites and think they were about to explode.
But then the debunking process began. Most notably, famed usability expert Jakob Nielsen found in 1997 that, yes, people do scroll down on the homepage. His own words were, “[W]e have seen that most users scroll when they visit a long home page or a long navigation screen.”
And yes, you read that right: 1997. This conclusion was formed almost 14 years ago. Yet the myth still somehow prevails even today.
And if you read that study, you’ll see that the myth was formed in 1994 (maybe not a myth then) out of a recorded behavior of people not understanding the concept of scrolling. That’s because the internet was a brand new thing in 1994–so new that there were more people reading newspapers than there were looking at webpages.
So folks, this is why I cringe whenever I hear those three words, “above the fold.” It’s a concept founded in 1994 that was subsequently debunked in 1997. People do scroll; it’s been studied and confirmed. And yet were now two new decades away and there are still those subscribing to the myth.
Whack-a-Myth
Another great study on the fold was done by Milissa Taquini at Boxes and Arrows back in 2007 (yes, 10 years after the myth was originally debunked). The basic premise of the article is that people are still scrolling, but there’s also some useful guidance on when the fold is relevant. The best advice from Milissa (and a basic rule of thumb as she notes) is “that for every site the user should be able to understand what your site is about by the information presented to them above the fold.” That doesn’t mean cramming everything at the top; it means just making sure those bare essential items (like who you are and what you do) are instantly visible when someone views the site.
I have a feeling this myth will keep popping its ugly little head up from time to time, and I’ll continue to keep kicking it back down, because that’s all it is: a myth.
