Yes, all the recent user research we've done (I work at Yahoo) says that users have got a lot more comfortable with scrolling since Nielsen's original research in the 90s. We officially Do Not Care About The Fold now.
Anecdotally, for some applications (documentation, news) a single really long document is preferred to lots of pagination. I haven't seen research to that effect though.
I thought that above-the-fold still has to do with first impressions. If I get to a website and I see a link that I looks a mostly-like-what-I-want, but a link that is definitely-what-I-want is further down the page, I'll probably click the mostly-like-what-I-want link because I saw it first and it looks "good enough."
Let's do a thought experiment. If you put the ads all at the top of the page, and all the non-ad search results below the fold you'd probably get a reasonable click rate on the ads. Now, let's think about if we put all the non-ad search results above the fold, and all the ads down at the bottom. Do you think people would get to those ads and read them nearly as much?
> I thought that above-the-fold still has to do with first impressions.
Sure, the original version (lets call it the "strong" version), was based on the idea that "Users don't scroll", but now we know they do, so the strong version has fallen.
The weak version could well be to do with first impressions, part of a more general, "Put the most important stuff first" rule.
I distinctly remember a forum I used to post to, where they put very large banner ads at the top of every page. I'd have started scrolling before the page finished loading - you soon learn where the real content is on a page. Add in "banner blindness", and all bets are off.
Hence the increasing popularity of putting ads between sections of content... I'm looking at you, StackOverflow.
That's really interesting. I've always assumed it was a knowledge / teaching problem, but I'd forgotten how much the addition of mousewheels changed my entire browsing experience.
I never understood that preference, actually. In the early/mid 90s the connections were sporadic, and I always preferred to get the entire page when I (finally) got a working connection. If I found a page that I had to follow links to keep reading, the experience was often read->click->wait............read->click->wait..........
I personally preferred downloading an enormous page, even going away from the computer for a few minutes, but then having it all available.
Not exactly, as I read it. In the Nielsen studies about the fold, I thought the takeaway was that users didn't realize they could/should scroll, and that this is no longer a problem.
That doesn't mean that what content appears above the fold has no effect on the bounce rate or user experience. If all I see above the fold are ads, I'm moving on. Of course, this is Google, so they can get away with significantly more than most.
