Hot answers tagged truncation
17
Fading the edge of text can be a useful alternative to ellipses, and I would argue is superior in some ways.
Don't Confuse the Content
Ellipses replace text content to do their job, which can cause confusion about what the actual text is. Does it include the "..."? If I cut/copy/paste, does that come along? A fade changes the way the content is ...
10
If at all possible, you should avoid truncating a unique name. Restricting usernames to a maximum length is one way of dealing with this.
However, if you have some very long usernames:
don't wrap the elipsis (…) to another line. This makes it appear at first glance that the full username is visible, and is likely to cause confusion.
you should make sure ...
5
A quick check of developer.android.com shows that the standard approach to stop text wrapping over lines is to go with your second option: to display with ellipses.
android:ellipsize= causes words in the text that are longer than the view is wide to be ellipsized instead of broken in the middle
However; considering this is UX.StackExchange and this ...
4
Summed up:
The point with gradients and fadeouts 2) always is the same: They don't play well with bad monitors/LCDs.
The Contrast problem
Left: looks good on designers monitor || Right: fading out much earlier.
The colour range problem
Bad Monitor:
Good Monitor:
As you can see above, not every user will share your personal experience on your ...
3
Truncating a username is a bad idea. Usernames are used to uniquely identify a person on your site, so if you're randomly hiding part of the name, that's defeating the whole purpose of the username.
With such a limited amount of space like the example posted here, it would be more effective to just get rid of the usernames altogether, and only show the ...
2
I really haven't see the "faded text" technique used much, but I think the point of the user experience is to design for whatever makes it easy for the user. If the user has to try to guess what is going on, I think you are defeating the purpose. In most cases just adding the [...] or [more...] will suffice and provide a clean easy to follow path for the ...
1
Where there is a real need to truncate a label, where to put the ellipses depends on data. The default is normally at the end, however for some data it is better to see part of the beginning and the end. But the later takes up more space as you need to display enough characters at both the beginning and the end. For other data, numbers for example, ...
1
There is a non-written rule, that instead seems to be set in stone, about not breaking labels.
Possibly many layouts would badly break if one tried to set a two-line label, which could be one explanation.
That said, I would not truncate a long label but instead I'd break it in as many lines as necessary, also breaking the (boring) regular spacing of the ...
1
Summary: It depends, but default to 'abcdef...' over 'abc...def'
I would choose the method on the basis of whether text at the end or in the middle of the string is more likely to differentiate the item. This would be dependent on the domain (so I don't think isolated studies from particular contexts would be helpful).
On a property website, for instance, ...
1
You ask about whether the use of faded text has been tested at all?
As I see it this is an example of the idea of using "information scent" in a user interface. In other words how can you visually give users a sense of where the data lies in an information space. In this case the fading indicates that there is more information in this direction that you ...
1
The nice thing about using fading text (for those who don't know what this means: gradient transparent overlay so that the text 'fades away' into the background color over the course if a couple lines) is that it is much larger and harder to miss than ellipsis. In addition, while ellipsis almost always work to indicate, sometimes the text just seems to end ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
