Clicktale (an experience analytics company) published a blog post back in December 2006 smashing the “people don’t scroll myth” to bits. However, 3 ½ years later clients and colleagues still make this claim fairly regularly. So I figured this study is a good one to keep tucked away ready to pull out for myth busting as required.

Users don’t scroll?
In a month long study analysing over 120,000 web pages Clicktale found:

• 91% of the page-views had a scroll-bar.
• 76% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled to some extent.
• 22% of the page-views with a scroll-bar, were scrolled all the way to the bottom.

“While 22% may seem low at first, it is actually quite high as many page-views are repeat views where the visitors have previously scrolled all the way to the page bottom and are already familiar with the page.”

Ok, well how long was the page?
Further more, when digging deeper, Clicktale did not find that longer pages performed worse than shorter ones. The graph below shows the percentage of users who scrolled more than 90% of the page relative to the page length.

More excellent articles on myth busting can be found on http://uxmyths.com/

Chris Rockwell as published his presentation entitled People Can’t Tell You What They Want (and nine other design research myths) to slideshare. Here are the ten myths he discusses:

1. Design Research constrains true innovative thinking.
2. People Can’t Tell You What They Want.
3. We’re inventing something never seen before so research isn’t applicable.
4. Qualitative and quantitative research are opposites.
5. Ethnography is the best research technique.
6. Participatory design research is superior to ethnography.
7. Focus groups aren’t useful.
8. The research team owns customer insights.
9. Designers can’t design until the research is complete.
10. When the research is done, you know everything you need.

I found this very interesting, not only to confirm my own views on some of these points, but also because each point is tackled with simplicity and style. I wish I had had this presentation on hand when talking to a few clients in the past :)

Thanks to Rob Tannen for the tip.