[Sigia-l] Usability on "The Fold"

[Stew Dean]

At 21:11 19/08/2005, chaniyas at nyc.rr.com wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>
>I'm doing research on the new "fold" for my company website.   The latest
>article from Jakob Nielsen looks at Scrolling and Scrollbars, and appears
>to make some good points about how poorly designed scrollbars can frustrate
>uses, create accessibility challenges, and cause people to miss
>information.

My advice here is use standard scroll bars and do not use scrolling windows 
on the page for text - and I would say that's a hard rule that so many 
sites break. It reduces the importance of the text any times over and is 
fiddly for the user to use. Add to that non standard scroll bars as you 
often seen in flash and you have the worst of all worlds.


>One of the statements he makes is: "Display all important information above
>the fold. Users often decide whether to stay or leave based on what they
>can see without scrolling."

That's right for 'attraction' pages. For information pages for when the 
user is engaged scrolling not a problem. Designing all of a site in 'letter 
box mode' if want users to read more than a paragraph or two of text.


>With more people used to the idea that the information on their screen will
>scroll, is it as important to have everything "above the fold?". Also, as
>of last year, we had some findings that monitor sizes greater than 1024x768
>account for 63% of internet users hence the use of the 800x600 monitor
>screen is declining.

>Does anyone have any thoughts or feedback on what the "new" fold is?


Monitor sizes not the only  important factor as few people  browse at full 
screen. There is no standard 'fold' any more. The useful maximum size of 
viewable web page is about 750 by 500 but this is approximate and will not 
work for a minority of users. You can never win them all, although you can 
make the site accessable, it just wont' be as attractive to some.

Stewart Dean
User Experience Consultant