In 1935, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger posed a question to illustrate a problem with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics when applied to everyday objects.

The ‘experiment’ proposed was that a cat is placed inside a sealed steel box with a radioactive source, a Geiger counter and a flask of hydrocyanic acid. If the Geiger counter detects radiation, it will cause a small hammer to shatter the flask and the cat will die else the cat lives, purrs, meows and does other cat things.

All fairly straight-forward so far. However, the Copenhagen interpretation would allow for a case where the cat exists in both states of being dead and alive. Now clearly this state cannot be observed and leads to the more common philosophical question of ‘was the cat dead or alive in the box before you opened the box to check?’ or simplified even more to ‘was the cat in the box before you opened it to check?’

So what has this got to do with web design and ‘The Fold’? It’s all about observation and the person observing.

The fold is a concept in print design. Picture a newspaper stand. All the newspapers are placed neatly folded in half. The top half is on display and designed to capture your interest and entice you into buying the paper and reading further down the page. ‘The Fold’ refers to this point halfway down the paper where it is folded for display.

Now on the web, we don’t have a physical fold but what we do have is a point where content drops off the bottom of the screen forcing the user to have to scroll down the page to read any further content. We cannot prevent a page from scrolling without limiting the amount of content on the page and even then, we have no control of the resolution of the screen the user is viewing the page on so we can’t determine how much content is the maximum amount before causing scrolling to be necessary.

We have come to a stage where we can say that a reasonable majority of users will be familiar with and understand the concept of having to scroll down a page and so it is quite common to hear designers screaming ‘THERE IS NO FOLD!’ shortly before leaping out of the nearest top floor window whenever posed the question by their clients. However, I would disagree. There IS a fold, but it’s position is not fixed from one user to the next. If presented with a page that requires scrolling there is some content that will be initially hidden from the user. Now if this is critical information, the user my not scroll down and find it. As Schrödinger’s cat’s state of life or death is undetermined unless being viewed, our page and the position of the fold is similarly undetermined.

To solve the problem, it is firstly important to grab the users attention and maintain their interest to continue reading down the page. It is also just as important to ensure that the layout of content is carefully considered so as not to hide important information or calls to action away from sight.