Why Enforcing Character Limits in UIs Fails (and What to Do Instead)
Reading time: 6min
Why Enforcing Character Limits in UIs is a Bad Idea (and What to Do Instead)
Character limits can feel like a neat solution for keeping your UI clean and consistent. But here’s the problem: the world we design for is messy. From diverse languages to the endless variety of screen sizes, rigid character limits don’t scale. Worse, they often lead to usability and accessibility issues, leaving users frustrated and your product looking inflexible.
And let’s be honest—truncating text is rarely a solution with the customer in mind. More often than not, it’s about making the UI look “pretty” or adhering to a specific design aesthetic. While a clean layout is important, prioritizing aesthetics over usability ends up doing a disservice to your users. The goal of a UI is to serve your audience, not to cram content into a box for the sake of visual tidiness.
Let’s unpack why character limits are usually a bad idea, when truncation might make sense, and how to handle text constraints in a way that keeps everyone happy.
The Problem with Character Limits
Character limits might seem like a simple way to control your UI, but they often create more problems than they solve. Here’s why:
1. There Are No Standard Screen Sizes
We live in a world of infinite devices. From phones to ultra-wide monitors and everything in between, the idea of designing for a single screen size is outdated. A character limit might work perfectly on one layout but overflow awkwardly on another or leave too much empty space.
2. Languages Break Limits
Character limits assume text will always take up the same amount of space. Spoiler: it doesn’t. English text may fit fine, but when translated into German, French, or Russian, a simple word like "Settings" (Einstellungen in German) can balloon and throw your design into chaos. Character limits also fail to account for languages like Arabic, which expand differently due to contextual letter forms.
3. Accessibility Suffers
Truncated text often hides important context from users relying on screen readers or assistive technologies. If there’s no way to access the full content, these users are left with incomplete information, creating a significant barrier to access.
Even if your UI provides a way to access the full text, such as a tooltip or modal, you’re introducing an additional step for the user. Depending on the use case, this extra interaction can add unnecessary friction to their workflow. Imagine a scenario where a user with a screen reader is navigating a long list of truncated items—if they need to interact with each one individually to get the full context, their experience becomes slow and frustrating.
In high-frequency or high-stakes workflows, like reviewing medical records, processing financial transactions, or searching for a specific document in a long list, these extra steps can compound into significant inefficiencies. A design that forces users to repeatedly “dig” for full information isn’t just inconvenient—it actively undermines productivity and can lead to errors or oversights.
Accessibility isn’t just about making content available—it’s about making it available easily. Truncating text without careful consideration can turn what should be an intuitive experience into an obstacle course.
The UX Issues Caused by Character Limits
Let’s look at how character limits impact real-world scenarios:
1. Truncated Text With No Context
Imagine an e-commerce app where product titles are shortened to fit a card layout. You end up with something like:
- Before: “Organic Cotton T-Shirt - Women’s Size Large”
- After: “Organic Cotton T-Shirt -...”
Users can’t tell if this is the product they’re looking for, forcing them to click into every listing to find what they need. Not great.
2. Inconsistent User Experiences Across Languages
In multilingual UIs, rigid character limits can make the same UI feel clean in one language and completely broken in another. A button labeled "Get Started" works well in English but doesn’t fit when translated to Commencer maintenant in French.
3. Lost Opportunities for Responsive Design
Character limits lock your content into a fixed mindset, ignoring how modern design needs to adapt. On a desktop layout, a headline might look oddly short, leaving wasted whitespace. On mobile, the same headline overflows, forcing truncation.
When Truncation Makes Sense
While truncation is rarely the ideal solution, there are situations where it’s a practical compromise. The key is to understand the context, ensure usability, and weigh the trade-offs carefully. Here are two examples where truncation can make sense:
1. Truncating Long Identifiers (e.g., UUIDs)
Generated identifiers like UUIDs are long and often difficult to parse visually. Users rarely need to read the entire string but may need to verify specific portions. Truncation can make these identifiers more manageable while preserving enough context for users:
- Truncate in the Middle: Keep the beginning and end visible for reference,
like
123e...89ab. - Truncate the Start (if Sequential): If identifiers share a common prefix,
hiding the repetitive start and showing the differentiating end (e.g.,
...456789ab) can improve readability.
This approach reduces clutter without sacrificing functionality.
2. Managing User-Generated Content: A Real-World Example
Here’s an example from my own experience: I once worked on a piece of software where users had a habit of naming documents with absurdly long titles—50+ words, in some cases. While our ideal solution would have been to retrain users to adopt shorter, more descriptive titles, it wasn’t feasible. Changing ingrained user behavior wouldn’t have provided enough benefit to justify the effort, and forcing new limits would have risked alienating users.
Instead, we opted to truncate titles in the middle, showing the first and last portions of the text. Since the app was used exclusively on desktop (not mobile), this still allowed users to see over 20 words of the title—enough to locate the document they needed. The design balanced usability for the users while maintaining consistency across the interface, which kept our product team sane.
Sometimes, real-world constraints force you to adapt. While it wasn’t a perfect solution, it was the best compromise given the context and user behavior.
Best Practices for Truncating Text
If you decide to truncate, follow these essential guidelines to maintain a positive user experience:
1. Always Provide Access to Full Text
Users should always have a way to view the complete content. Some common approaches include:
- Tooltips or Popovers: Show the full text on hover or tap.
- Expandable Text: Use a
[...]button to expand the truncated content in place or in a modal.
2. Ensure Accessibility
Truncation should never block screen reader users or assistive technologies:
- Use an
aria-labelto include the full content. - Alternatively, include the full text in a visually hidden element and
reference it with
aria-describedby.
3. Preserve Full Text for Searching and Filtering
When truncating identifiers like UUIDs, truncate the display, not the actual data. This ensures users can still search, filter, or copy-paste the complete information. Avoid APIs that truncate text before returning it—this almost always creates issues for both developers and users.
Truncation: Almost Always the Wrong Choice
While truncation might occasionally make sense, it’s usually the wrong solution. Here’s why:
- You’re Designing for Limitations, Not Possibilities Truncating content assumes your design is static. But modern UIs should be dynamic, adapting to various screen sizes, languages, and contexts. Why force content to fit into a box when you can make the box fit the content?
- It Creates Hidden Complexity Truncating text adds extra layers of UX complexity. Users need tooltips, modals, or other mechanisms to access the full content. This makes your design harder to use and more challenging to maintain.
- It Fails to Solve the Underlying Problem If content feels too long, consider rethinking your layout or interaction model. Can the information be grouped or segmented differently? Could you prioritize key details and hide less critical information by default?
The best solution is often not to truncate but to design flexibly, allowing content to breathe and adapt.
Final Thoughts: Truncate Wisely, Design Smarter
Enforcing character limits or truncating text should never be your default approach. Instead, focus on designing UIs that scale gracefully—across devices, languages, and use cases. When truncation is necessary, implement it thoughtfully, with clear access to the full content and accessibility in mind.
Further reading
- Another Stab at Truncated Text by Geoff Graham.
- Taming Long Text: The Art of Truncation with CSS by Tejeswar Reddy