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In the web design world there is a principle called "Above The Fold", which basically refers to the space that is seen by a user without the user having to scroll down the page. The idea has been to cram as much information and content above the fold because users don't like to scroll down. Well today I came across a research study that dispels the "Above The Fold" idea. It's says what I've known all along. A user will scroll to view content.

As shown in the previous section, visitors do scroll to the bottom of the page. But are they less likely to scroll to the page bottom if the page is really long? The answer is no, as can be seen in the next set of charts:

Another problem is that you can't accurately determine where the fold actually lies. A user can have their window sized to any dimensions, thus the point at which the fold can be in a user's browser is potentially endless. What is the fold on user A's browser is different from user B's browser. So to compensate this, clients and project managers set an arbitrary number for the fold which, in essence, is just a guess.

As you can see, the fold location is concentrated around three peak areas. The peaks are located at about 430, 600 and 860 pixels. Do you recognize these sizes? No? These fold sizes correspond to the three most popular screen resolutions used today: 800×600, 1024×768 and 1280×1024. Except that they are missing about 170 pixels that correspond to the most common size of the non-client area of the browser. The dispersion around these peaks is accounted for by variations in screen size, window size, browsers and browser add-ons.

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