One of the comments we hear a lot here in our web design department is that users don’t like to scroll. Clearly, this presents a challenge in trying to balance our clients’ desires, and Google’s need to have lots of content to index. TL:DR website scrolling works.
Research shows, that like so many things un UX design, it’s not the action thats the issue, it’s the result of the action that has given rise to this misconception. In other words, once the scroll interaction produces a pleasing result, we absolutely should embrace website scrolling!
Rocking the Fold
The fold is what we and many others call the area of the page thats visible before any scrolling. With UX design, we’re always trying to guide our visitors through our content carefully balancing the delivery of more and more as they drill into our websites. If we attempt to deliver too much, too soon, we run the risk of choice paralysis, not to mention cluttered, crowded design. This is a vitally important consideration for home and key landing pages where a user might only be one or two steps into browsing for the information they want. We need to set out our stall in a compelling way that will encourage that button tap or scroll down. Clutter is not the way to achieve this. In fact, research shows that less content above the fold actively encourage scrolling. But for this to happen, we need a clear call to action. Crowding that call to action with too many options will simply result in users bouncing.
Guided Website Scrolling
Great! the hero (another name for an above the fold, feature section) has done its job and the user is now scrolling. Now what? We need to deliver a little more info. The user is interested, but unlikely to be in ‘Word Document’ territory just yet. We need what comes next to be easy to skim and pick out the next level of detailed content.
Creative Web Design
Our web design team like to use creative typography, white space, icons and images to deliver chunks of info with a clear path to drill even deeper. For extra pop, we often use animations to deliver content dynamically during website scrolling. This is where our bespoke design & build process comes into its own. We don’t shoehorn our clients into pre-made themes and templates, we build unique user experiences for each and every project, ensure that where we deliver website scrolling, its setup for success.
Completing the Journey
If our visitors have arrived on the landing page and scrolled down before clicking to a deeper page, it’s clear they are interested in what we’re saying. Now we need to decide if we’re ready to ask them to become a customer (convert) yet. This very much depends of what we’re selling. The purchase decision varies hugely across our varied range of clients and their customers. For example, an e-commerce website selling a highly desirable product at a great price needs to allow the user to get the user to the checkout in as few steps as possible. A professional services firm looking to establish a new client relationship need to do a lot more work before conversion, so this is where great content is key. We need to provide thought leadership and insights to position the firm as the best provider while giving plenty of due-diligence ready information.
Research-Led Design
If we have decided we’re ready to offer a conversion, we gotta make it clear, friction free and satisfying. Nothing will turn a prospective customer away quicker than a poor conversion experience. If we’re not ready to convert, then we need to look at building and testing out some journeys to see which is performing best. This is where our digital marketing team come into their own. By creating great content for our designers to work with, they provide the building blocks of landing page variations where we can build and test different journeys. This means we’re designing with solid research, not just a hunch so that when we design website scrolling led experiences, we know they work!.
With close collaboration between our Graphic Design, Digital Marketing and and Web Development teams, we’ve achieved stellar results for some of our clients. Wanna talk about your own experience and how we can help? Drop us a line or give us a call!