Born to Scroll

🎶 Born to scroll the endless feed 🎶

Clicking was the standard way to navigate the web. Scrolling was considered bad or risky design. Early usability research warned about the “below the fold” problem, because users historically paid much more attention to content at the top of a page. Jakob Nielsen and other usability researchers emphasized placing important information immediately on page load, since early studies showed around 80% of viewing time happened above the fold. That guidance reflected how websites functioned at the time. Pages were living documents where users scanned, evaluated links, and clicked to decide where to go next, like turning pages in an encyclopedia.

Modern research shows that behavior has evolved. In Nielsen Norman Group’s 2018 study, 57% of viewing time still occurred above the fold, but attention below the fold had increased significantly. Roughly 43% of viewing time now happens further down the page, meaning users are interacting far more with content that requires scrolling than they did in earlier studies.

Enter: the feed. Since 2018, platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter trained billions of people to navigate information through continuous vertical motion. Short-form video accelerated this dramatically. TikTok in particular turned scrolling into a continuous discovery mechanism. Media scholar Tarleton Gillespie (2018) argues that platforms do not simply host content but actively organize and shape how participation unfolds online, structuring visibility and public discourse through their systems. We lost interest in turning the page and we learned to explore interfaces by scrolling. The gesture became the default way people move through digital space.

Today the long scroll page has become an increasingly common website structure on the internet. Organizations can present their story through a single vertically structured surface that guides visitors through the core narrative as they move down the page. From my perspective building sites and studying how people actually navigate them, the most effective approach is a hybrid structure: treat the homepage as a guided scroll, then connect it to deeper pages where people can explore programs, research, or ways to participate. Usability research still shows that attention drops after the first screenful, which is why the most important ideas should appear early in the page while deeper content lives behind clear navigation for visitors who want to go further.

Collections like One Page Love curate thousands of examples of websites where an entire digital presence lives inside a single narrative scroll. Browsing through them can be useful for understanding how sections are sequenced, where calls to action appear, and how organizations guide attention without relying on complex navigation.

For nonprofit organizations considering a website redesign, the long scroll can be a practical structure that reflects how people already move through information online.