Clicktale recently published some findings from their analytics data that reveal some interesting things about user behaver when it comes to scrolling. They used a subset of 120,000 page views from 11/06-12/06. Their service records the height of the web pages, the height of the window and the bottom-most location the user scrolled to.
Global Statistics
- 91% of the page-views had a scroll-bar.
- 76% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled to some extent.
- 22% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled all the way to the bottom.
Findings
- Visitors are likely to scan the entire page no matter the page size.
Recommendations
- Don’t try to squeeze your web page and make it more compact. There is little benefit in “squeezing” your pages since many visitors will scroll down below the fold to see your entire page.
- Since visitors will scroll all the way to the bottom of your web page, make life easier for them and divide your layout into sections for easy scanning.
- Minimize your written text and maximize images, visitors usually don’t read text - they scan web pages.
- Encourage your visitors to scroll down by using a “cut-off” layout.