[teetermld]

Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.

I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.

[bhauer]

> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.

I disagree, because you're not calculating anything. You just see the existence of a scrollbar and know immediately that the content exceeds the viewport and you can scroll. That's it. It's at least an order of magnitude faster than the alternative of "checking" because it happens instinctively without the slightest motor movement.

"Checking to see if something scrolls" means some form of finger or hand movement.

I know what you're saying though, because I do see people do it all the time. There is an awkward, to me, pattern of "I just started reading, so let's shake the content up and down to get oriented." It's just as foreign to me as people who highlight text as they're reading. Not my thing, but whatever. (On the highlighting behavior, I always figured it's both a visual cue and at least partially a matter of highlighted text becoming light-on-blue, which is easier to read than most web pages' black-on-white.)

> I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.

That advice was commonly head in web design and it wasn't really about people not knowing whether they can scroll or not. But rather, that visitors might just decide not to scroll before they leave your content because the first page is so uninteresting to them. It's because scrolling requires interaction that you're motivated to make the "above the fold" content grab their attention.

A behavior of "let's see if this scrolls by actually scrolling" is, in my opinion, an anti-pattern of bad UX.

[cr0sh]

I don't know if this is still done in grade schools or not, but long ago when I was in grade school, teachers would pass out strips of paper for reading - and as a bookmark. The idea that the student would hold it under the sentence in the paragraph they were reading so that they didn't get lost or lose their place.

I had been reading since before I started school; it was something I picked up early and that my parents encouraged in me greatly. So by the time I was in school and we were doing these reading exercises (which were mostly utterly boring to me at the time, because my favorite thing to read at home were my various science encyclopedia sets), I had no need for such a placeholder. Reading was natural to me, and I knew where I was in a paragraph, etc.

Of course, this upset the teachers, until they finally figured out that yes, I could read, and not only that, I could read well above my grade level (that said, my comprehension wasn't as great, unless it was geared toward topics of science).

I always figured that people who highlight text as they read on a screen do so for similar reasons; not that it's a stupid thing or anything - sometimes with long lines, small fonts, bad color/contrast choices, etc in text on a screen, you do need some kind of a marker to help you along...

[appleiigs]

Now you are supposed to put the strip of paper above the line you are reading. It reduce re-reading, gives you context of what’s coming up next.

[chillfox]

I frequently highlight text while reading because the lines are too long and I end up loosing where I am when looking for the next line. This is usually only a problem on desktop.

[couchand]

You might check out Beeline Reader. It's awesome for this exact use case.

[masswerk]

Are you actually checking every paragraph, section, list, etc? There may be additional content with overflow-y…

(This is a real-world issue: In a write-up, you may want to present detailed data, but don't want to have every user, interested in the details or not, to scroll over several pages of extensive data. So the logical choice is to present a small, illustrative sample and have more in the overflow. The same technique may be used – and has been historically extensively used by the Engelbart community – for outlined text content.)

[DJHenk]

> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.

This is the typical narrow minded view that these app designers (not you) have. There are other uses for the scroll bar. For instance, I used to be able to tell how long it would take to read an article by looking at the scroll bar. Now they are gone and to compensate every other article now as an indication of reading time. Which is of course a worse solution, because people's reading speeds differ and it also clutters screen estate, even is a more annoying way.

The well known xkcd[0] about breaking workflows does not only apply to features, but also to UI. Few designers seem to acknowledge that.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1172/

[albedoa]

Who do you sympathize with in that comic?

[admax88q]

Not when your head does that calculation automatically based upon the pattern recognition that it excels at.