Cheers Joachim

From 8 years of using a lot of user testing, and studying empiric data from the behaviour of most Norwegian users (I have the privilege of working with a site that is visited by most Norwegians regularly), I’ve learned that some users will hit absolutely every possible obstacle. Indeed they do scroll, I hope that isn’t the message I’m sending, but many also consider everyting that is on the page they’re on. I mean everything! And they often don’t reflect over the perhaps obvious parts that may be hidden below the fold.

Users aren’t dumb at all. But I, as a web developer, have been pretty stupid numerous times :) And a lot of users don’t have the faintest idea what a scroll wheel is, let alone that you can scroll without using the scroll bars. I hope we can make it more obvious to them what they’ll find on the page they’re at, and the site they’re on.

While it is sometimes good practice to get important content and user-actionable functions high up on a page, the time for seeing web pages as having a “fold” has long since past.

Jacon Nielsen in 1994 discovered that only 10% of users scrolled a web page. That was 15 years ago and has changed significantly.

Users aren’t dumb. Most users, even those who aren’t yet web savvy, understand that pages scroll and they often use the scroll wheel on the mouse the get an overview of a page from top to bottom, before returning to the top and reading the page in detail.

Be aware of the issue, yes, but I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.

To aid that, I hope the overlay tool can be of assistance!

Tnx for your feedback, I really appreciate it!

So the key, I think, is dealing with the fold in a constructive manner. Put key features above the fold, but don’t be afraid to make the user scroll. Hey, maybe you even have som white space left.