So if people are so well up on maintaining websites why is print so awful? if you want to print a web site you end up printing 10 pages to get one and often doing it again with it resized! Google maps for example. Print preview is also rubbish and is no help with this and often the printed output is nothing like the preview, you would ahve thought with all the hype about the environment that this would have been fixed overnight like the year 2000 issues!
I remember MSDN forums wasted lots of screen space with lots of vain stuff and only couple of titles of user threads was visible until scrolled. So I think you don’t only need to give hints above the fold but make good use of the space so that people don’t necessarily have to scroll.
Also I don’t like those iFrames or such Flash boxes that prevent me from scrolling the main page when mouse pointer is above them accidentally. Those boxes grab my scrolling focus and scroll the boxes instead of the page I am scrolling. It is a page, not should be an obstacle dodging course.
On the other hand some programs that have two areas for scrolling sometimes scroll the one with the focus instead of the one my mouse is over. I hate it when I point the left list and scroll and the right list starts scrolling because the focus was still in the right list. I mean, I was focusing the left list with my mouse pointer, additionally clicking the left list is just an unnecessary burden.
I remember the same thing happens with Visual Studio 6 in other manner. When my focus was in the object browser, all the menu items were disabled including item “Next Bookmark”. I hate that, because there cannot be bookmarks for object browser, so why make me first click source code before I can use bookmarks? Just unnecessary burden. I am not so stupid that I become confused when I go to next bookmark, because obviously there are no bookmarks in object browser and I know it because I never made any there.
And then tooltips that pop up like mushrooms after a rainy day of course pop up stealing my view of the list. I use mouse pointer to work and click things and also hover over things, but that doesn’t mean the tooltips should block my sight of the near items. Some people have suggested super tooltips that would be even larger providing more information, but that would be horrendous sight stealing unless the supertips appeared somewhere far.
Yes, ribbon wastes above fold space.
And one more thing that I hate is that many sites don’t allow pages to be scrolled over the edge. When I use laptop then the screen might be low, so I would like to scroll the content in the end of the page to the middle of the page. But I can’t scroll, because there is no empty white space after the page. This happens also in Windows Exlorer folder browser. When there is no space in the end of the list or so, the folders jump up and down instead of staying in one place while I open or close them.
Still missing the point. I could safely stop reading once you stated that - back when - “people still didn’t know how to scroll”.
You are still missing teh point. It is not the point that people don’t KNOW how to scroll. They just don’t expect to have to scroll in order to see the hoops they ought to jump through (bias intentional).
They see a text box, and this is all they expect and need. So they enter the text. Anything below the so-called fold will not ever draw their attention because they don’t need it. You might think they should need it, but that is the fallacy. YOU (your site) need it.
Ebay made some recent changes for the worse in this regard. My wife sells a lot of stuff there, and she recently started getting complaints that critical information was missing. It wasn’t really missing, it was just below the fold - and the area above the fold looks complete, removing the incentive to scroll.
I think there is a distinction to be made here: content can go below the fold, but functionality should be immediately available. E.g., I do not mind scrolling to continue to read an article or to view all the headlines. However, if I have to scroll around to find the search box that is bad UI.
For a site like SO I think that you don’t need to worry about keeping things above the fold. Look at your user base - the site is targeted towards programmers. How many devs out there don’t scroll? With the exception of Superuser, I would say the same applies to the rest of the trilogy.
I would think that there are more people who use the site that won’t format their questions out of laziness rather than some content being below the fold, and not seen. Granted this is based on no scientific evidence other than I know I have done it. 
We should tell users to stop folding their screens. Then they could see below the fold.
(Somebody had to say it) 
Great topic, but I think there are some very important points to consider:
-
Everything ‘important’ must be above the fold. The user should see what your webpage is about, and how to navigate it all without scrolling. The menu, logo, title and beginning of the content should all be there. Menu items (like footer links) that are below the fold tend to get ignored.
-
Scrolling is BETTER than clicking next page, next page, next page etc. Many sites like news sites break content into pages in order to maximize advertisement impressions, but I have yet to meet a single user who prefers this method to the all-on-one-page method. I for one jump to the Print version if I see this kind of thing.
Jeff, if you think embedded iframes are so bad, then why
are you using them on Stack Overflow? This is certainly
one of the most annoying features of SO, especially when
the scrollbar is horizontal.
What is this?! You mean users can learn new things?! Blasphemy!
And they still won’t give a crap what their post ends up looking like.
Oh heck, the myoptic coder again.
Learn to think.
1st. How many Mac users with a scroll mouse have you seen?
2nd. If you can scroll till your relevant information were you can enter text, why should you scroll down to a fucked up preview, you never need to use on a normal page?
I’ve only recently begun using stackoverflow; it’s a great site!
But once I almost missed some good information because the ad near the bottom was near ‘the fold’ and I thought (for a moment) that the page ended there.
You might want to make the ad more obviously, an ad.
The fold is definitely something to worry about when displaying content, but you should also account for those that are looking to prioritize how much energy they’re going to have to expend to read the content. Those familiar with how the scroll bar works will look at the size of the bar to judge how much content is on the page. Nearly every post in this blog is a prime example. If I’m interested in just reading the blog post and not the comments, I can’t judge how much content I’m going to have to read through because the comments expand the page size so much. If I’m looking for an answer to something and I come to a page where the scroll bar is smaller than the size of the cursor I’m immediately looking for another page because that’s too much content to scan through.
For me, it’s pretty simple. It’s not about whether I know how to scroll, it’s whether I want to scroll.
If I’m looking for something specific and the top of the page doesn’t catch my eye, I don’t even bother scrolling – Why should I?
There are a dozen other sites that won’t waste my time making me beg for what I want competing with the hundred sites that just want to sell me an unrelated solution, have no useful content or just exist to waste my time.
A website has a fraction of a second to convince me it’s useful before the decision is made to move on – Unless your content is that unique or that special, there is no second chance.
Jeff, I think you’ve completely missed the point. The Fold, whether it is a usability problem or not, is quite frankly not germain to the problem of correctly formatting posts on SO.
The underlying problem is that MarkDown is NOT WYSIWYG. A few simple changes to MarkDown such as having the Enter/Return key function as it does in pretty much every other application would go a long way towards solving the problem.
Just bite the bullet and listen to your users on this.
Oh, and because you like self linking. Here are a couple of your own posts on the subject.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001063.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000880.html
If your users consistently expect it to work one way maybe you should take their ‘feedback’ and observations of their behavior into account.
Interesting thoughts - I always try and focus on putting the most important stuff above the fold - but in today’s world of multiple resolutions and screen orientations its really difficult to cater for everybody.
As with most things, we live in an ADD/ADHD world, unless you grab the reader’s attention right away, it really doesn’t matter how your page is designed - the whole site will be skipped. That is of course unless it’s a customer service site, then the user will scroll for hours looking for the direct contact number ;0
There are people that can not use the scroll wheel for motorical (e.g. quadriplegia) reasons.
Those KNOW how to scroll, but it is very time consuming for them to do so.
The fold is still very relevant. It’s not that users don’t know how to scroll; that is stupid. It’s that you have to grab them above the fold to give them a reason to WANT to scroll.