For quite a while there has been a back and forth in interface design about whether scrolling is a “good” or usable choice. If you have a lot of information or content on a page, should you present it all on one page and have people scroll? Or should you break it up into multiple pages and have people move forward through pages?

Note
The term “the fold” comes from newspaper design. When a newspaper is folded in half, there’s text above the fold and text below the fold. Online there’s the same concept, but “above the fold” refers to what people can see on the screen without having to scroll.

One rule of thumb in online design is that if it’s important, it should go above the fold—that is, if you require people to scroll past the fold, they won’t and therefore information below the fold won’t be seen. Is this true?

Chartbeat analyzed data from 2 billion website visits and found that 66 percent of the visits’ time were spent below the fold; in other words, visitors had scrolled.

ClickTale analyzed 100,000 visits to websites and reported that people scrolled on 76 percent of the pages and went all the way to the bottom on 22 percent of the pages.

Note
People are used to vertical scrolling, but horizontal scrolling is still a bad idea. (I’m distinguishing between a swipe and scroll.) Horizontal swipes are much easier to perform than horizontal scrolls.

Takeaways

It’s all right to create a page that requires vertical scrolling.Avoid horizontal scrolling. But horizontal swiping is OK.Even though people will scroll, make sure to put your most important information above the fold.To encourage scrolling, keep showing great and useful content.Avoid “dead zones,” places that are so uninteresting that people tend not to scroll any further.