NSFW

I understand that it’s tough to get people excited about boring tools and approaches, especially invisible things like semantic HTML, edge cases, and truncation. But without foundational, behind-the-scenes work, products and features can break in terrible ways. Just ask Karen McGrane. She’s an accomplished digital strategist who has spent the past few years warning the UX community that truncation is not a content strategy. But people continue to ignore her, even though she’s written not one, but two great books.

Why? Because solving for truncation is low glory work. To be blunt, it’s a pain in the ass. But Karen is right. And when truncation fails, it can be far more painful:

These two make the point (hilariously) that in almost every instance, there is a better widget or design pattern you could be using than a drop down.