A web firm out of the U.K., CX Partners, says their user testing sessions document that scrolling is, in fact, NOT objectionable to most web surfers.  Or, at the very least, not an obstacle to their getting what they want from a site:

Over the last 6 years we’ve watched over 800 user testing sessions between us and on only 3 occasions have we seen the page fold as a barrier to users getting to the content they want.

What is the fold?

Above the fold is a graphic design term that refers to important content being on the upper half of the front page of a newspaper. It’s commonly used on the web to describe the area you see on a web page before you have to scroll down the page.

Why we don’t worry about the fold

People tell us that they don’t mind scrolling and the behaviour we see in user testing backs that up. We see that people are more than comfortable scrolling long, long pages to find what they are looking for. A quick snoop around the web will show you successful brands that are not worrying about the fold either:

The firm uses an eye tracker which creates a heat map for each user in the test group.  These maps are combined into a collective heat map which documents what the test group was looking at on a page.  Not only do their heatmaps show users looking at the scroll bar (indicating its use), they indicate ‘below the fold’ hot spots.  One somewhat surprising result was that less content ‘above the fold’ actually encouraged exploration below.

Of course, as designers, we are completely fascinated by this research.  It helps us build sites that perform better for our clients.  However, with so many of you blogging and otherwise impacting the layout of your sites regularly, we’ve decided to start sharing some of the research with you, so you can use it when you create posts and pages.  When we do, we’ll conclude with the briefest of what we think you should take away from the post.  In this case:

Learn 3 things:

1. Less is more.  Don’t cram everything together; leave ‘whitespace’, room for the eye to rest between photos and text when you compose a post or page.  It will encourage visitors to wander elsewhere on the page.
2. Avoid the use of horizontal lines.  Take care that your horizontal block of images don’t create an imaginary line indicating this is the end of the page or the start of the footer.  Avoid a row of buttons or thumbnail images that send the message to STOP reading further.
3. Frames are evil!  Long-time followers will recognize this familiar soap box; we’re always happy to have another reason to encourage you to avoid the use frames and iframes, those in-page windows to another web page or site.  Of course, there is a place and time for everything but this is one practice with a very short list of acceptable applications.  In the context of today’s topic, they simply trick the user into thinking there is less content than there is by shortening the page.  As a result, content is frequently not seen.