![]() Myth #3: People avoid pages with a lot of content: People have the ability to handle vast amounts of information, when presented properly.People will see the bottom if you give them good reason to go there. While you should still be mindful of people’s limited attention span on websites and prioritize content wisely, you shouldn’t fear long formats. Reluctance to scroll is a behavior of the past. Myth #2: Customers don’t read information at the bottom of the page: Our eyetracking research show that while users spend 80% of their attention on information above the page fold, they allocate 20% of it to content below the fold.The standard scroll wheel on a mouse, arrow keys, and track pads have made scrolling much easier than acquiring click targets.įrom our research report, How People Read on the Web: The Eyetracking Evidence: This example illustrates how far people read and scroll on a page where the information is relevant and properly formatted for the web. In fact, people prefer scrolling the page for content over pagination when the topics within that page answer the right questions. Myth #1: Users don’t scroll long pages: Users do scroll when the content is relevant, organized properly, and formatted for ease of scanning.Many website owners implement accordions for the wrong reasons. Myths about Scrolling and Long Content Pages on the Desktop Make sure to optimize your pages for printing. Accordions are often not well suited for printing documents and require people to print snippets of content at a time. Printing is another consideration that a reader correctly points out. ![]() In contrast, plain text is inherently accessible (though it can definitely be too complicated for disabled users to understand, but that’s a standard writing issue which you should consider in any case.) Pages and widgets must be coded with accessibility in mind, which is an added development effort. Accessibility is an important consideration.When content is hidden, people might ignore information. Headings and titles must be descriptive and enticing enough to motivate people to “spend” clicks on them. An extra step is required to see the information. Hiding content behind navigation diminishes people’s awareness of it.Acquiring click targets, such as links and buttons, and waiting for content to appear requires work and wastes precious time that users don’t want to give. However, resentment ensues when a click is considered a wasted effort it doesn’t take many wasted clicks to escalate people’s reaction to full-blown defiance. Readers treat clicks like currency: they don’t mind spending it if the click is worthwhile and has value. (Every single decision, no matter how minor or how easy, adds cognitive load.) The experience feels less fragmented with fewer attention switches. It is easier to scroll down the page than to decide which heading to click on. In this situation, it’s better to expose all the content at once. If people need to open the majority of subtopics to have their questions answered or to get the full story then an accordion is not the way to go. Forcing people to click on headings one at a time to display full content can be cumbersome, especially if there are many topics on the list that individuals care about.While accordions sound ideal for presenting complex content, like with many other widgets and implementations, they are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Without proper cues people are confused about where they are on the site. People expect clicking a link will load a new page. Accordions can be a better alternative to within-page links, which are problematic because they break people’s mental model for hypertext links.Hiding (some of) the content can make the web page appear less daunting.This allows users to form a mental model of the information available. The headings serve as a mini-IA of the page.Collapsing the page minimizes scrolling.There are other advantages to applying accordions to long, content-rich pages: By allowing people to control what content they see and what remains hidden, the information feels less overwhelming. In theory, it is a useful way to present content. In theory, this concept sounds reasonably human centered. Giving people control is #3 on the list of the top heuristics for usable design. Allowing people to have control over the content by expanding it or deferring it for later lets them decide what to read and what to ignore. It is one of many ways you can expose content to users in a progressive manner. An accordion menu is a vertically stacked list of headers that can be clicked to reveal or hide content associated with them.
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