Storytelling in Design

Chapter 13. Applying Scene Structure to Wireframes, Designs, and Prototypes

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Applying Scene Structure to Wireframes, Designs, and Prototypes

The Things That Didn’t Fit Above the Fold

During my first years at Dare, we frequently had conversations with clients about getting content above the fold. This phrase was originally used to refer to the upper half of a newspaper page. It has since come to mean the part of the web page that is visible without scrolling and that contains the most important content. All our wireframes had a nice dashed line indicating where the fold was likely to be, to both help us and to preempt questions from clients. It worked, but the question usually still came up about getting even more to fit above the fold. It wasn’t just at Dare that we had these conversations. Numerous discussions arose in articles and blog posts, and although I didn’t go to any UX meetups or conferences at this time, I’m sure plenty of discussions took place there too.

At one point, the trend was to design websites that didn’t go below the fold. They extended down only as far as the browser screen would go, and all the content would fit within the visible area of the screen. On those projects, there weren’t any discussions about the fold. Instead, we discussed right and left navigation as well as big canvas-style websites, almost like a big flat lay of pages that you’d move up and down, and left and right. Gradually, however, more and more research started suggesting that ...