(a) Above the fold page. When you visit a webpage, what you see in your screen as is, without having to scroll down is called the Above-the-fold page.
(b) Below-the-fold page Using the same logic as above, for convenience sake, let us then define that part of the page we see only after we scroll down, as Below-the-fold page.
Below-the-fold Blackout.
Let me explain what I mean by Below-the-fold Blackout with an example. When you search for a video in msn, the search engine rank orders the results are per its algorithm, and displays 16 results per page neatly stacked in after the other, and the total results runs into several pages. There is a navigation button on the top and bottom of the search results display, to move from one search results display to the another. Normally, 8 videos are displayed on the Above-the-fold page, and the rest of the 8 videos on the below-the-fold page. (depending upon your screen size), something like this
If a user is impatient, or just plain lazy to scroll down, he might navigate away from one search result display page to the next, without scrolling down and seeing the entire search results on page 1. So effectively, out of the first 16 most relevant search results, the viewer has viewed (skimmed) only 8 videos, and when he uses, the top navigation button to go to page 2, he is served the display results from 17-32, out of which only 17-25 are visible in the above the fold of page 2; Thus, the search results 8-16 that were displayed Below-the-fold of page 1 were blacked out from the viewer. If the viewer follows the same pattern of skimming the results in each page before moving to next page, he is served the results
1-8----->17-24----->33-40---->49-56 and so on. The intermediate results 9-16, 25-32, 41-48 are blacked out, and this is a whopping 50% of the search results.
What are the implications of Below the fold blackout? When ecommerce sites siuch as bestbuy.com displays search results of products in the manner how msn video is doing, the users experience a discontinuous display of search match. By the time he is in page 3, he is seeing 33rd match of his search querry, without having seen the 50% of his best available matches that were served to him anyways (only that he didnt scroll down to see), and the ecommerce site will eventually lose the visitor because the chances that he will find his product are now less and less.
What can we do to prevent Below-the-fold blackout?
One simple way is to not provide the top navigation button. Keep the navigation button at the bottom of the screen. Let the users scroll down fully, and then navigate to the next page. But this can be irritating for the user , especially if your page is long. So, another method could be to incorporate a simple logic in your search display. Using javascript such as this, we can detect whether a portion of the screen has come to the viewing pane of the viewer. Now, when the viewer moves to the page 2 of the search results, we can then display from the results beginning from which the viewer has not viewed in page 1. In our example, it would be mean that the viewer is now served the results 9-24 if he has navigated from page 1 using the top navigating bar without scrolling down the page 1 to see the results 8-16.
I am not very sure how complicated this coding process would be, and there could be better ways of doing the same thing. But the fundamental idea is more effective conversion, and customer centricity. Putting ourselves in the shoes of the average customers, and giving what the customer wants and optimizing our ecommerce site to suit customer's natural behavior will certainly increase conversion rates. Many users have very limited attention span in a page - about 3-5 seconds, and we cannot force the user to scroll the page down. A web analytics software may not be able to give you such detailed information and visibility of how a viewer (customer) "actually" navigates in your page, within your page. But what we can do is to alter our scripts and codes to serve the search display without such Below-the-fold blackouts, because, in ecommerce, Customer is King, and Conversion is Cash.
