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My product has Announcements.

Where we will ask user to input their Announcement text. And site will show this announcement as a flashing content over user's home page.

I am confused on "what should be the text length of announcement text box".

Announcement text length should be restricted or not ?

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You could trim the text at a certain length and add an ellipsis (...). Then on hover you could display the full announcement in a tooltip. – Matt Rockwell Jul 18 '12 at 11:48
Yes. That I can do. But typically announcements are short in length or it can be of any length ? My question still persists – Sachin Gawas Jul 18 '12 at 11:51
It depends entirely on context. Are you wanting your users to add announcements that explain huge amounts of info or do you want it to quickly inform them of something. There is no definitive 'THIS IS THE ANSWER', it depends entirely on how you are going to use it. – Rob Quincey Jul 19 '12 at 11:35

2 Answers

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@Matt Rockwell's strategy of a mouse-over allows was one I was fond of on a recent project. We worked through several strategies on our app landing page. In beta we used the hover to expand, but opted for a different strategy to more easily support touch devices. 5 seconds after login, we launch a notification using notify.js. When the user creates the notification initially, they have 280 characters (internally we called this twitter x 2) and can include 1 hyperlink. So if their notification is too long or has significant detail, they can link to that additional detail which opens in a new tab. Keeping your announcements brief puts the responsibility on the writer, to craft something concise and brief to they the point across.

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What you could do to answer this questions is implement a way on which you can measure which announcements are good (like CTR) and try different lengths.

For example, try delivering the same announcement with different lengths to different people. Then try the same with multiple announcements. Keep on doing it until you start seeing a trend.

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