“Can we get all of this above the fold?”
It’s a question we still hear surprisingly often. The phrase itself comes from newspapers. When a newspaper was folded on a stand, editors wanted the most important stories visible on the top half – above the physical fold. For newpapers, that made perfect sense. But websites don’t have a fold and they haven’t for a very long time.
Everyone’s “fold” is different
To state the obvious, websites aren’t made of paper. They’re responsive things that change shape, size and layout to best suit the thing being used to visit them. Your website might be viewed on a large desktop monitor, a laptop, an iPad, a phone held vertically, a phone held horizontally, or any number of different screen sizes and resolutions. This means that what you can see without scrolling on your screen is not necessarily what somebody else can see on theirs. It also means that designing around an imaginary fold on the screen is problematic and futile.
Scroll scroll scroll…
More importantly, the way people use digital products has changed enormously. Think about some of the most-used apps and websites in the world: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. Their entire experience is built around scrolling. Nobody gets four swipes into Instagram and thinks, this is ridiculous, I shouldn’t have to scroll this far. Scrolling is instinctive. We barely notice we’re doing it. The problem isn’t asking somebody to scroll – the problem is giving them nothing worth scrolling for.
Prioritise
This doesn’t mean the top of the page doesn’t matter. The fact that users are happy to scroll is not an excuse to bury important information halfway down a page – the top of your page still has very important jobs to do:
- It should quickly confirm to somebody that they’re in the right place
- It should establish what the page is about and pique their interest early
- It should give them a reason to continue.
And if there’s one particularly important action you want somebody to take, there may well be a good reason to introduce that early too, but that is very different from trying to squeeze everything into the opening screen – seven calls to action, supporting copy, jump links, statistics, buttons, news, testimonials, another donate button just in case somebody somehow missed the first three – at some point you’re no longer helping the user, you’re shouting at them.
More content doesn’t mean more communication
It’s often been said that you can’t psychoanalyse yourself. In a similar vein, something odd often happens when people look at their own websites – they stop behaving like normal internet users. When we visit somebody else’s site, we happily scroll. We skim. We take things in progressively. We follow the visual hierarchy of the page. But when we visit our own site we forget our own experience – suddenly every message feels critically important, why have one donate button when we could have seven, why leave that lovely piece of empty space when we could fill it with another message?
This is all understandable. If something matters to your organisation, you naturally want to make sure people see it, but adding more information to the same space doesn’t necessarily make any of it more visible. Quite the opposite – when everything is competing for attention, nothing gets enough attention.
White space isn’t wasted space
Space is one of the most important tools a designer uses to create hierarchy. It separates ideas. It helps important content stand out. It gives your eyes somewhere to rest and allows a message to sit with you before the next one arrives. That doesn’t mean information architecture stops mattering. The content still needs to be structured properly. The order still matters. Headlines, navigation, calls to action and page hierarchy all need careful thought but it is the space between things that supports that structure. It isn’t a choice between space or content – it’s space in service of content.
A well-designed page can take somebody on a journey: establish the subject, introduce the key message, provide supporting information, build confidence and ultimately lead towards an action. That journey might involve scrolling, and that’s OK. In fact, it probably should. So the next time you find yourself wondering whether everything needs to fit on one screen, worry less about where the fold is. Ask a better question – is what comes next worth scrolling for?
Give people a reason to keep scrolling.
If your key landing pages feel cluttered, confusing or overloaded, we can help. Get in touch with Herd to create clearer user journeys that hold attention and lead people towards the actions that matter.
