[deepfriedrice]

Agreed. It's hard to believe that marketing pages, after decades of evolution and testing, haven't landed on what users actually want, rather than what they say they want.

Scrolling is such a natural behavior for internet natives. Being able to leverage a large screen to visually compare things has its place, but the article uses a horrible example:

> Our condensed product page prototype took the same information from the original dispersed page and arranged it in a 2x2 grid that allowed users to compare multiple services simultaneously, without having to remember the details of each service.

What's to compare? They're disparate services.

I do like the example of the product specifications. But that was more of an objective usability issue: requiring more clicks for more information.

[crabmusket]

> Scrolling is such a natural behavior for internet natives.

My jaw dropped at the participant who apparently saw the hero section of one of the pages, and thought that was the whole site. I get that scroll bars are invisible these days so you can't immediately see the page height, but not even trying to scroll anyway is wild to me.

But tons of users are not "internet natives".

[supriyo-biswas]

It’s not at all uncommon.

Scrollbars can show up at weird places and not do anything at all due to UI issues, and they’re not that visible anyway in proportion to the page contents, even if we are to assume Windows 95 style scroll bars. Therefore the only indication of whether a piece of content is scrollable is its layout, and a hero taking up the entire viewport height is next to impossible to understand.

This is the reason many such pages have a “Learn more” page whose only function is to scroll the page down by one viewport height, or less commonly a pulsating arrow at the bottom that tells the user the content is scrollable.

[crabmusket]

I totally understand the point about the scroll bars, I meant to say that I habitually scroll pages, without even thinking. There's no analysis, no attention to the (hard to see) scroll bar, the intuition is always to scroll. Even when it's very clear that I'm intended to be at the bottom (e.g. I can see a conventional footer layout) it's just a reflex.

But yes, I agree with you it's undoubtedly common (enough). I was just pointing out the difference with "internet natives".