The Scroll

When designing pages designers very often come up against dealing with the scroll point of the page. That being the flexible point on the page beyond which placing content initiates the browsers inherent page scroll. This point however trivial it may seem initially presents a number of issues with which the design has to grapple. Firstly content placed below this point is never the first thing a user sees, secondly a vast majority of sites require length pages to be able to accommodate their content and thirdly, in user testing it becomes clear that user can sometimes miss any content below the scroll altogether.

Long pages are a fact of life as designer has to understand and accommodate. So how can we make sure these lengthy pages do their content justice? Firstly I’d argue that a lengthy homepage is more problematic than a lengthy content page. Users a generally in a scavenging mode on a homepage and are likely to be less concerned with the whole page than they are about quickly identifying something of relevance to their task and acting upon it. Content pages on the other hand find users in a more stable state and more led by the actually consumption of the content on the page than they are by the need to scavenge another more suitable location. So where the rules about keeping business critical functions above the scroll the importance of this factor is contextual.

So how as a designer to you exploration full exploration of your pages? A news article for instance can cope very well with this exploration. It’s very content is linear, it leads the user from the top to the bottom. If the user comes to the bottom of the screen they are conditioned to scroll the page. This fact becomes obvious when advertising is placed with articles. These provide an experience ‘break’ and publishers find themselves requiring notes on the page to the effect of: ‘Article Continues’. Homepages have less inherent characteristics that promote full exploration. In some cases the actual task of designing for ‘above the scroll’ creates an almost finished page with little visual clue that the page continues below the scroll. This by it’s very nature inhibits exploration: the user has been visually conditioned that the content ends and there is nothing more to see, when in actual fact there could be.

Think about how you could engage users to explore pages below the scroll. Try not to ‘finish’ the top portion of your pages and avoid creating a visual full stop before then end of the content. Provide content leaders that cross the scroll boundary to emphasise that content does indeed exist below the scroll. Users explore pages by seeking out items that hint to their preconceived next destination – make sure you give your users these hints


And here's a link for some more discussion on this...
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of