Content must look continuable at the fold
Aliases: peek cue · cut-off card · premature closure
What it is
The last thing on the first screen is a complete card, with a band of empty fill under it, looking like the page has ended. A catalogue and a buy button still sit below, but the completeness is taken as a stop, and the finger does not move. Continuability at the fold asks that the cut at the fold look like “more”, not “done”: an image with its lower half sliced, the top of the next card peeking, a list that has not finished — those license a scroll.
It does not decide which key facts sit on the first screen. It decides whether the first screen’s lower edge looks like an ending.
Why it happens
A sense of completion is a strong stop signal. Gestalt closure reads a card with four intact edges as a finished unit; a same-colour gap under it looks even more like a footer. People are not computing “content height implies more”. They are talked into stopping by that finished unit. Slice an image, or expose the top edge of the next card, and closure cannot complete; vision rereads it as “an object cropped by the viewport, the object continues below”, and scrolling becomes finishing the object.
The cut has to fall on recognisable structure. A cut between two empty bands still looks finished. A cut through a chin, or through a line of type, looks unfinished.
Studying it
Keep the first-screen content, change only the cut at the fold: a complete card plus a gap versus the card’s lower half sliced versus the top of the next heading exposed. Measure whether a scroll starts.
Independent variables: whether the element at the fold is complete, whether the next section peeks, gap height. Dependent variables: rate of starting a scroll, scroll depth, verbal reports of thinking the page had ended.
Device height has to include short viewports, or the cut never meets the fold on a tall screen and the experiment false-negatives.
Where it stops holding
A tool home whose tab bar already says “this is one dashboard screen” does not want continuability; slicing a card there looks broken. A paywall or a sign-in wall that hides what follows would make a peek cue into a cheat (it looks like more; scrolling hits a wall). Print and PDF have a real end on every page; a cut looks like damage. Screen readers do not see a sliced edge; continuability has to be a phrase (“N sections remain”), not half an image.
Applying it
- Inspect the bottom edge of a landing frame on the target device. If the last element has four intact edges and empty under it, expose the top of the next section, or let an image or card be sliced by the viewport.
- Do not “close” the first screen with a heavy rule or a large band of whitespace — that is an end signal.
- Long prose should leave an unfinished sentence or the next heading near the fold, rather than a complete paragraph and then a gap.
- How to check: crop 2 pixels off the bottom of the landing frame and ask “has this page ended?” An answer of “ended” when a full screen still follows means the continuability cue was never sent.