Truncat...

“If there’s more than 200 characters, we’ll put an ellipsis and add a Read More link.”

And then you click on that Read More link and, well, you’re underwhelmed that it only showed three more words. If there were only three more words, why not just show them!

As a developer, it’s really easy to see a spec like “no more than 2 lines” and do something like this:

if ( content.length > 200 ) {
return content.substring(0,200) + “…”;
}

A better experience, though, might be to only truncate when text is exceedingly long and truncate back to a short amount.

if ( content.length > 300 ) {
return content.substring(0,200) + “…”;
}

I haven’t actually scientifically tested this and I’d be curious to see how this would perform. The drawback to this scenario is that if you actually want to always clamp to the same certain number of lines then this won’t really work since some lines would be longer if they fit between the 200 and 300 character range (or whatever range you specified).

It’d work better for longer swaths of text, say four of five lines in length since the variability there would be less noticeable — especially if shown along with one, two, and three lines of text. (e.g. a Facebook feed.)

Anyways…