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Designing “above the fold”? Try the reciprocity principle
Asking users to “Schedule a Demo” requires more than one page
Keeping important points ‘above the fold’ was one of those fundamental design rules I always followed until I had to break it.
The ‘fold,’ in recent times, has become more of a concept rather than a hard measurement. With our users having a wide range of devices and screen resolutions, we can’t know exactly how much of the site the user will see. So instead, the ‘fold’ nowadays is more to ensure that what is visible on the page without requiring any action is what encourages us to scroll.
This is a matter of interaction costs: whatever is visible has low interaction costs to view, while ‘invisible’ content (users might have to scroll or click on) requires much more interaction.
Most of my designs would often focus on keeping the key points visible without scrolling. But that all changed when I had to design for a different call-to-action: getting users to schedule a demo.
Why the fold becomes problematic for “scheduling a demo.”
Many websites often do not provide much information before asking users to do something, but that’s sometimes okay. The reason is that these websites provide a simple value proposition to their users: the value offered to their users can be summed up in just a few words.
This is known in UX as the law of reciprocity: give your users something before asking for anything from them. For example, most public websites might be asking for somewhat small things:
- Sign up for the site/Create a free account
- Login to the site
- Buy a moderately priced product
- Navigate to a place (like a store page) where they can sell you products
- etc.
As a result, they can fulfill this law by providing a small amount of information to their users. This might be a paragraph of text, a demo, or a quick summary of their value…
