Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Generally good advice, but the idea that the majority of a page's visitors don't look below the fold isn't entirely fallacious, as Jakob Neilsen reported in 2010: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html

I suspect the percentage of people scrolling down the page is continuing to increase, but even if it's not, I don't think it's that important. The majority of people visiting a typical Web page don't "convert" anyway (that is, they don't do something that the page is designed to encourage). The key is to give a good experience to those who do want to engage and providing content below the fold is a legitimate way of doing that (and, as Neilsen notes, is better than 'paging.')

All that said, saying "You're still reading. Pretty crazy, huh?" doesn't prove a point though. Clearly the percentage of people who scrolled and are reading.. are reading. But I might just be in that 20%. Without hooking up some JavaScript to your page, we can't get a figure on what percentage that is ;-)

On any other article the massive header would be obnoxious, too. As a human who uses the web I think (naïvely) that it'd be nice if I could start reading the content of a page from the top, and I certainly shouldn't have to scroll down a page to start.

I understand that the author is trying to prove a point, but before I knew that I thought, "God, what a ridiculous page layout," and I was closer to closing the page because of it. I guess the moral of the story is that you can shove your relevant content "below the fold" if you like, but only if you're making a joke.

As for the 37Signals example, I think the article is exactly wrong on that one. The first section of that site has obviously been designed with specific intent - they're giving you descriptions of their products, and making the case for using them. It's all sales. They're not "telling a story", or waiting for you to reach the end of the page so they can tell you where to go next, those links at the bottom of the page are just there for people who forgot to click the links at the top of the page.

I'll agree that most of the "content" is below the fold, but that information is down there quite deliberately. Users aren't expected to scroll down, they're just catered to if they're not satisfied with the content at the top. Again, the content above the fold has been chosen with specific intentions - everything else is secondary to it. If anything, this example works against the point of TFA.

It's entirely good advice. People will scroll if they're intrigued enough. Follow up that intrigue with something remarkable and you will get more engagement than just scrolling. The most important bit:

> Just put a bit of thought into creating quality content and presenting it in an interesting and readable way. This will make visitors stick around for a while and use that magic scroll button.

The Neilsen study does not and cannot, due to the subjective nature of what constitutes an interesting design, guarantee tested sites met these criteria.

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