I guess I was feeling too web analytically inclined lately because I have been only reading about IA/UX stuff now.  There was an interesting research posting by ClickTale, that studied how users scroll and whether or not they are actually reading things below the fold.  There are 2 parts to the study, but part 2 is where they give substantial conclusions and advice.

Turns out people do scroll. Go figure. Its relative to the position in the page though, and people’s attention span drops dramatically after the top until they get to the footer, which they pay close attention to. Here are the main recommendations:

• The most valuable web page real-estate is located near the page top, between 0 and 800 pixels. Visitor Attention and Page Exposure peak at about the 540 pixel-line.
• If you have a long web page,  add “stop points” such as headers and images to prevent your visitors from quickly scrolling down the page. It will prevent their attention from waning towards the end of the page.
• The footer of your page is important! Users do pay quite a bit of attention to that area of your page.

This is interesting to me because the primary argument of a person sitting in on a redesign meeting at the Burke was that no one will ever look below the fold, so they asked me to make a different mock-up reflecting that.  While I think the most important/engaging content should remain above the fold, it turned a content-rich page into something that does not have much content because of the design restrictions imposed. You can see an earlier mock-up in the portfolio section, but I was undecided on whether this was a better alternative or not. I would post the new mock-up but I don’t know if that’s allowed yet.

Uber complicated graph from ClickTale

And if anyone is in the market for an amazing smelling candle, I bought the Aloha Orchid one from Anthropologie. Very nice. And all the millions of people who decided to make identical Excel macro tutorials need to stop.