False bottom

A false bottom is a place on a page that reads as the end of it. The reader arrives, sees what looks like a closing band, and stops, and everything below that line might as well not have been published. Nielsen Norman Group calls the same thing the illusion of completeness, which names the mechanism well: nothing is hidden, and the reader has simply been given every visual signal that there is nothing more to look for.

The ingredients are ordinary and that is the problem. A full-bleed band in a different colour, a generous stretch of whitespace, a centred rule, a logo or a sign-off sitting on its own, a row of links that resembles a footer, a section that happens to fill the last of the viewport. Any one of them is fine somewhere else on the page. Together, and landing near the bottom edge of a screen size the designer did not test, they compose an ending. Most false bottoms are accidents of styling rather than acts of malice, which is exactly why the term is worth having: nobody in the room decided to do it, so nobody notices until someone names the thing that happened.

It is worth keeping distinct from the boundary it exploits. The fold is where the viewport happens to end, which changes with every window and is nobody’s design; a false bottom is a design that claims the content ends there. The fold is a fact about the reader’s screen, the false bottom is a sentence the page is saying, and the sentence is wrong.

When it stops being an accident it joins other company. A page that puts the decline option below a convincing ending is running misdirection with layout instead of contrast, and at that point it is a dark pattern rather than a slip. The repair is the same either way, and it is cheap: suggest continuity. Cut the whitespace at the boundary, keep the closing band for the actual close, and let the next block break the line, because half a visible card is the strongest instruction to keep scrolling that a page can give.