There is no Fold

I have recently been called to account, in two separate occasions, for a link on a web page being "below the fold."

"Below the fold" means roughly "below the visible part of the page when it first renders." Or, "stuff you have to scroll down to see." There is an urban myth going around that you shouldn't put anything of any remote importance "below the fold," because, apparently, the web is rife with drooling morons who haven't been able to get the scroll bar to work.

The problem is that a lot of non-web-designers have somehow got it into their head that this is the ultimate litmus test on whether you have a good page design: are there any links they like "below the fold" as it is rendered on their personal computer? If so, well, why don't you go back and redo that page?

The problem with this is that there is nothing you can say to this without sounding defensive or uncooperative. If you say, "well, it's not below the fold on my computer," you're being flip. If you say, "if your content is good, they'll scroll," you're just saying that to avoid doing work (as if moving a link up the page is some Herculean task).

That's why I was glad to see this article about the myth of the fold line.

It actually goes over the research that examines the validity of the "below the fold" argument, and the research is pretty damning. Not only has research shown that scrolling been pretty much universally understood since the late nineties, but there is also evidence that the vast majority of users actually do scroll down web pages.

One juicy tidbit is that there is no fold. When you make the argument that it's dumb to base design decisions on the fold since there are so many factors that influence its position (browser, OS, browser features, browser settings, device, screen resolution, default font size, etc.), you get the argument "yeah, there will be a few pages that don't, but you can take the fold location that most users have." However, research shows that this percentage of users is about 10%. In other words, if you plan your page layout for a specific fold line, only 10% of users maximally will see that optimal design. Even if you lump in fold lines that are close together, you only account for 26%. There is no such thing as a fold line for "most" users.

But the best part of the article, actually, was in what one of the commenters on the post said. She pointed out that every novice user she's introduced to the web intuitively began scrolling without any problem, but she always sees them "back right out from a visual overload without thinking to seek lower." That's the real point here. By embracing this "fold line" nonsense, we may actually be driving people away because bad, cramped design does more to deter users than having to scroll to get to information.

Now, how do I get these armchair web designers to read this article?

Chore Wars

Chore Wars is a great example of using a gaming aesthetic to improve the experience of a non-gaming activity.

Say you are living with a bunch of roommates. You all create characters on Chore Wars, and together create a set of "adventures," such as taking out the trash, doing the dishes, folding laundry, etc. Each adventure has an associated experience point award roughly equal to the number of minutes it takes to do the activity.

As your roommates do their chores, they gain experience points, and start leveling up. The character class mimics the types of chores done - for instance, someone who does a lot of heavy lifting chores, like moving furniture, will become strong like a warrior, while someone who does a lot of "smarts" chores, like balancing the checkbook or paying bills, will become smart like a wizard.

Even better, you can assign fun treasures and monsters to each adventure for a little bit of fun.

The resultant mechanic is no different than just keeping a spreadsheet of chores, but it's much more interesting this way, and provides a built-in competitive incentive to do chores. And by letting your roommates measure the chores done, you can easily tell who should have to clean up the dog vomit in the middle of the living room floor...

Full Performance of Madame Sarita's Spirit Parlour 2006

I've just uploaded the full performance of Madame Sarita's Spirit Parlour 2006 to the ImaginEERIEing site.

This year, things take a darker turn as Sarita, desperate to stop Marius's evil plot, is forced to make a pact with the Dark Powers of the Earth.

Bug Fix in the Code Thumbnailer

It came to my attention that there was a bug in the Code Thumbnailer code that was up on my Shockwave 3D Developer's Guide page. It doubled-up the type names on the thumbnails, instead of showing it once, and then including the rest of the member name.

Anyway, it's been fixed on the thumbnailer page. The updated version will also be included in the next release of the MVC Framework which I'm working on.

Interesting Site Statistics

I've been tracking my site statistics using Google Analytics and StatCounter for quite a while now, and I sat down tonight to really look at some of the data. It's quite interesting. Here are some fun facts about the traffic my site receives:

• Microsoft ain't doing so well. Internet Explorer browsers only make up half of my pageviews, which is quite a bit lower market share than I had been led to believe. The other half is made up of Firefox at around 40%, and Safari taking the lion's share of the remainder.
• Moreover, MSN search yields the merest pittance of page referrals compared to Google and Yahoo. MSN referred about 1% of pages that came in via search engines. Google referred 80%, and Yahoo about 18%. Also, MSN appears to be the least able to connect people with relevant content, because MSN yielded the lowest pages viewed per referral out of all the major search engines. (For example, AltaVista, which referred about the same number of visitors to my site, generated over five page views per visitor on average, while MSN generated barely over one. In other words, AltaVista connected me to people who were actually interested in my content, while MSN connected me with people who immediately left.)
• If browser hits are to be believed, Mac is gaining market share. According to the browser agents, at least 12% of my traffic is coming from Macs. Granted, Mac types may be more attracted to the creative stuff featured on my site, but none of the listed incoming traffic keywords have anything to do with OS platform stuff except for searches that either list my domain (people typing my URL) or looking for software (Magic Mirror for Mac).
• Only 20% of my traffic comes from search engines, which means that the remaining 80% of traffic comes from direct links - either people actively bookmarking my site or clicking on a link on a web page somewhere. In fact, 25% of my site visitors have no referring link, which I am guessing means bookmarked locations or referred to from other sources, like an email client.
• My "depth of visit" statistics are odd. The graph looks like your typical falloff chart with a lot of one-page visitors, less two-page visitors, even less three-page visitors, etc. But I get a spike at the end of the chart with a lot of visitors visiting 20+ pages. Now, that's probably the effect of the "long tail" talking, but I also get a spike around 9 pages, and another spike around 16 pages. Somewhere on my site, there's about nine pages of content of interest to a group of people somewhere, and another set of sixteen pages of interest to another group of people. My guess offhand is that my ImaginEERIEing site is the sixteen, and my Shockwave3D Developer's Guide is the nine. (My home haunt page has about 30 subpages, half of which is tours of previous years and the other half being how-to's, and my Shockwave3D site has eight subpages.) I think that means that when someone finds my site who is interested in the content I offer, they consume all of it, but maybe that's reading too much into the data.
• However, the above assumption is supported by the fact that almost 6% of my visitors spend more than an hour reading my site when they come. That's good - it means that trying to have a detailed, content-rich site is worth the effort, because people are reading it.
• Finally, I have a pretty international audience. Only 70% of my traffic comes from the U.S. That surprised me, since I have a lot of content that is not only solely available in English, but also concerns a largely American holiday: Halloween. Still, I get a lot of hits from Asia on my Shockwave3D stuff, and I get hits from Europe on my Arkham Investigations stuff. (This latter content actually includes some localized content, thanks to the efforts of some fellow Arkham Horror fans.)

Anyway, hope you found some of these statistics interesting. I think other people who have their own web sites should share stuff like this. Do you have any interesting tidbits in your server logs to share?

New Arkham Investigations casebook: Whispers in Darkness

A new Arkham Investigations casebook is available on the Arkham Investigations web site.

Based on Lovecraft's story The Whisperer in Darkness, the case is called Whispers in Darkness. When a torrential rainstorm brings to light a deadly mystery, you will travel to the Vermont countryside to face otherworldly horrors that lurk around the Akeley farmhouse.

It was originally written in Italian by a fellow Arkham Horror fan named Jocularis. The English version is available from the casebook archive.

Winding down the "Double Creature Feature"

The "Double Creature Feature" ACE/NETC Conference has wound down, and boy, are we exhausted. Being the host state for a conference of about 500 communications professionals and the IT professionals who support them can wear you out! Despite the rather impressive battery of sessions available, I was only able to attend about three, since I was proctoring, monitoring, and troubleshooting for the rest of the conference. However, there were still many highlights:

• Awards Banquet - While we had a slow year in the ACE awards for projects, the New Mexico crowd picked up three of the Professional Skill awards. Me, my wife, and our former boss all came home with best-of-discipline achievement awards, and it felt pretty great to have the appreciation of your peers. (Our boss's award in particular was good, since his contribution to the ACE organization has been very high, and the excellence of everyone in our department that picked up awards is directly tied to his unceasing support for continued professional development. I don't believe he is going to get recognized for those accomplishments in his home state, but I think it speaks more coming from a professional organization, anyway.)
• Attendees - The attendees at ACE/NETC, almost to a person, were friendly, knowledgeable, clever, and sharp. I enjoyed almost every conversation I had with people, and that's saying something coming from an introvert like myself. And they all seemed to be having a great time - I often heard that this was the best ACE/NETC conference yet. It feels great to put on something that makes people happy and which they appreciate; it's the same feeling I get when we do Carnival of Souls.
• Sessions - I didn't get much time to just go to sessions and listen, but I did manage to see firsthand some great sessions. My clear favorite was presented by Alessandro A. Bellina, from University of Illinois Extension, speaking about AJAX. It's not that AJAX is this new thing to me, but the web crew from Illinois are one of the few web groups I've seen in ACE/NETC that really are doing some well-designed and well-thought-out stuff. They don't just mash tech together for the propeller-geekery of it, as certain groups that attend ACE/NETC appear to do, but instead are putting real thought into solving problems effectively. I saw them present on their custom CMS for the Illinois Cooperative Extension System years ago and was mightily impressed - in fact, their vision of a CMS solution has highly influenced some of the solutions I have built since then for NMSU. It was great to see what they were up to, and I'm gratified to discover that we're doing a lot of the same stuff now.
• El Pinto – The night we all went to El Pinto was nice. Great weather, great food, great music, and a chance to go visit where my wife and I tied the knot 10 years ago. It was fun.
• Hanging with the crew - I spent a lot of time sitting around talking with people from work at this conference, and it was a lot of fun. It was fun chatting with people between sessions or around the impromptu Guitar Hero party in the hotel atrium one night. It served as a powerful reminder that I work with some really awesome people, and it struck me (as it often does) what a value it is to truly enjoy the people you work with.

All in all, it was a success, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. We're off the hook for hosting now for about 40 years. Yay!

Introduction to 3D Game Scripting

I've added a twenty-three-page tutorial to my Shockwave3D Developer's Guide page called Introduction to 3D Game Scripting.

It takes the new or novice Lightwave user through the process of exporting Lightwave content to Shockwave3D format for use in Director, and using my Model-View-Controller Framework (below) to begin adding interactivity to 3D scenes.

This document was uploaded in preparation for my presentation on the development of Science Pirates at the ACE/NETC "Double Creature Feature" Conference we're hosting in Albuquerque this coming weekend. If you'd like to learn more about developing Shockwave3D games - or any other aspect of communications from web to print to video (see the massive list of sessions) - it's not too late to register and attend!

El Paso Times article on our games lab

The El Paso Times ran an article on NMSU's Learning Games Lab today.

Introduction to Low-Polygon Game Asset Texturing

I've added a fifteen-page tutorial to my Shockwave3D Developer's Guide page called Introduction to Low-Polygon Game Asset Texturing.

It takes the new or novice Lightwave user through the process of texturing 3D geometry, with a particular emphasis on UV mapping objects for 3D games built with Shockwave3D. You do not need to have Director to follow along with the tutorial, but you do need Lightwave.

This document was uploaded in preparation for my presentation on the development of Science Pirates at the ACE/NETC "Double Creature Feature" Conference we're hosting in Albuquerque this coming weekend. If you'd like to learn more about developing Shockwave3D games - or any other aspect of communications from web to print to video (see the massive list of sessions) - it's not too late to register and attend!