Somewhere around the dawn of Internetdom, a study said that users don’t scroll. Ever since then, we’ve been cramming everything we’ve got into the first screen, “above the fold” (a term borrowed from newspapers).

Enlightenment from these dark ages has been slow. Over the last few years, new beliefs have emerged to eclipse the flat-earth thinking.

1. Users can learn to scroll
2. Encourage scrolling by flowing content beyond the fold
3. Reward scrolling with a good footer

Milissa Tarquini summarizes the Above-the-Fold Myth, referencing research from as far back as 1997 that says, “don’t worry–let them scroll.”

Comparison of Web Design Viewpoints

Jared Spool suggests using the cut-off look to encourage users to scroll. By not designing to squeeze above the fold, we engage the user to scroll further.

Mind The Bottom

Tarquini’s also points to ClickTale’s research on scrolling, which shows that 22% of people scroll all the way to the bottom. Considering that a good number of people probably find something click-worthy before they reach the end, that’s a high number of people scrolling way to the bottom.

What do we give them? Derek Powazek says to Embrace Your Bottom:

“In this business, a user that actually reads all the way to the bottom of a page is like gold. They’re your best, most engaged, happiest users. You know, because they haven’t clicked away. They did the best possible thing they could do, and now they’re at the bottom of the page. And how do you reward them?

With a copyright statement. Maybe, if they’re lucky, some bland footer navigation.”

Justin Kistner has some good footer examples. Do you have any?

Paging through search results is part of life on the web. The best ones give perspective. Where am I?

Two types of perspective

1. Global perspective: where am I in the entire search results?
2. Local perspective: what results am I near?

I looked at four sites that I use often and have paged search results. There is a lot more to search than paging between results, so there are other ways to show perspective. For now, I’m going to focus on navigating around results.

Technorati:

Looking at the first list, it appears there are seven pages of results. I go to the seventh page and learn there are at least three more pages. This will happen again if I click the tenth page, and continue on and on.

While Technorati gives me a good idea of where I am locally, my vision forward is obstructed. On the other hand, their global view backward is pretty good, making it easy to take me to the first result.

Flickr:

This is very similar to the Technorati results, but Flickr has changed a couple things. The addition of the ellipsis after the seventh page warns me that there are more than seven pages. An ellipsis is also added to the left side of the list when I get to the tenth result.

Flickr makes me very aware of where I am locally, but sends me for my calculator globally. 32,120 results at 24 per page means… 1,339 pages?

Yahoo! Real Estate:

Easily the worst of this group. When I get to the tenth page, I have to click the next link to roll over into the second set of ten pages. Yahoo! Real Estate gives me no local perspective, nor much global perspective beyond the total listings.

Realtor.com:

Finally, the best of the lot. On the first page of results, I can access the final page. When I’m somewhere in the middle, I had ready access to the three adjacent pages in either direction. Realtor.com has good local perspective, and globally, I can always navigate to the first or last page.

These are four different result sets, which are searches with very different purposes. The paging mechanism can be generalized to a long, ranked list. Providing some perspective of where we are locally and globally can communicate the list’s organization and make a little more sense of a search.

I’m looking for other examples, and your thoughts. Is this sort of perspective important? Who does it well?

MySpace rolled out a new feature recently called “Status updates.” It lets me tell my friends what I’m doing. This is an outright feature copy from Facebook, but that’s not the biggest shame.

Learning from others and making something better is a practice that built the web. At Kinkos, if I continually make a copy of a copy, the quality will decrease. Online we have the opportunity to avoid degradation.

MySpace should have seen Facebook’s status problems, avoided them, then found a way to be unique.

I applaud them for poking fun at themselves with the default “extended network” message. It provides a clue about what they expect the user to enter into the box. Otherwise, their status entry is incredibly confusing. It doesn’t tell the users whether they should write their name or whether the “is” will be included. Everything has to come from the original example.

That’s not simple, that’s simplistic.

The mood is a neat addition, ripped from LiveJournal. But again, they haven’t taken it anywhere. All they’ve done is created a long list of adjectives. Some have emoticons, others don’t, but I don’t know until I make my mood public.

Like most things MySpace, this is only halfway there. They’ve simply created a copy of a copy, which leads to a watered-down feature unless you come to it with something new.

The reasons MySpace is losing users to Facebook is not because people want to share their status. Facebook is succeeding because they’re a place for originality, not another useless junk heap.

I’m impressed with how Martha Stewart grasps iterative design:

“Whether you’re a programmer or a seamstress, it’s all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster–but not worse. Better.”

And yes, that’s her frosting a Wii cake. The quote above comes from an interview with Stewart about assorted geekery, including Marthapedia, her forthcoming user-contributed home tips site.

Consider this story of a father and daughter playing checkers for the first time:

“I eventually jumped her last piece… She stared at the board very carefully with furrowed brow and I finally said, ‘You don’t have any more pieces to move.’ To this, she simply replied, ‘Can I move one of yours?'”

Some might call this thinking outside the box. I’d say it’s a darn fine example of not thinking like a technician. But I think it goes beyond that, to say a lot about humans’ innate ability to let go of constraints and be passively creative (much different than brainstorming on a whiteboard and voting on the “best” ideas later).

It reminded me of my friend Mike’s commencement address:

“If there is only one thing you remember from my comments here today, it should be this: This is all made up.

By that, I mean that what appears to be ‘the way things are’ is really just invented by people. You, each of you, get to invent what your future will be like.”

What could you do if there were no rules, no laws, and no “way things are?”