Martin Hardee Oct 19, 2009

That’s good question.  As is pointed out in the article, Jakob’s original “users don’t scroll” mantra doesn’t completely hold today, because user behaviors have changed.  Actually, even back when this guideline was developed we all knew the users will indeed scroll to destination content if it was relevant to them.

As the article at Smashing notes “users are quite comfortable with scrolling and in some situations they are willing to scroll to the bottom of the page.”

They show Basecamp as an example of good page layout using a top of page “hero,” which works similarly to what we do on Cisco.com.

So, while it’s good to be aware of scrolling—especially on transitory pages—the reality is that users will scroll if they see that there’s more.

In the case of our Voice and Unified Communications page, for instance, you can see tabs with useful content even on a screen of 1024 x 768… and we know from tests that most users will scroll down to read if the content looks interesting.

Michael Nov 6, 2009

The point about visitors focusing on the human face is quite interesting. I didn’t know this, maybe it’s time to get some people on my web pages?

I think in general visitors are just looking for a clean cut, easy to use experience. They don’t want to be hunting for the information they require, we all know what happens then…they press the back button.