Skip to main content

Above The Fold

Some places I have worked, the usability experts have sworn by keeping all content above the fold. It was one of those golden rules that simply could not be violated. Entire websites were designed (or re-designed) with this goal in mind and often the end product was an eyesore. Yet all the content that mattered was above the fold just as the experts had decreed.

I had long wondered about this conundrum. Read an article recently that does an amazing job of explaining why this happens and also why this whole "over the fold" business is more than a little over-rated. Specially loved the design tips the author provides to encourage scrolling. 

Goes to prove that becoming dogmatic about anything including technology is not a good idea. It simply closes the door to fresh, new ways of thinking and forces a certain type of solution for all problems irrespective of the fit.

Comments

LIFE_REFACTORED said…
Well, there is no such thing as one size isn't it? For some sites, page-fold rule may hold just good and for others maybe not.
If we can avoid page fold, why not? If we have a compelling design that uses page-fold again, why not?
I believe that public sites where people come looking for specific information best work if the content above page-fold has the summary of the content that's below the page fold.
Some sites just fill up the content above page fold with big annoying flash that hides the content behind. They really do not help.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...