Summary:
Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.
In Web design, there's much confusion about the "page fold" concept and the importance of keeping the most salient information within a page's initially viewable area. (That is, in fact, the definition: "above the fold" simply means "viewable without further action.")
Information foraging theory says that people decide whether to continue along a path (including scrolling path down a page) based on the current content's information scent. In other words, users will scroll below the fold only if the information above it makes them believe the rest of the page will be valuable.
Attention Focused at the Top
The following chart shows the distribution of user fixations along stripes that were 100 pixels tall. The bars represent total gaze time, as opposed to the number of fixations. (In other words, two fixations of 200 ms count the same as one fixation of 400 ms)
Even though 5% of users' total time is spent past the 2,000-pixel mark, they tend to scan information that far from the top fairly superficially: some pages are very long (often 4,000+ pixels in my sample), and thus this 5% of user attention is spread very thinly.
In our study, user viewing time was distributed as follows:
- Above the fold: 80.3%
- Below the fold: 19.7%
We used an eyetracker with a resolution of 1,024 × 768 pixels. These days, many users have somewhat bigger screens,
