> At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?
I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')
See also: localizing your interface to German
Yep, any concern about text widows and orphans in modern app layouts becomes irrelevant as soon as you have to localize.
Just build your layout so it can squash/stretch appropriately.
Or if you're really insane, localize the entire UI.
Is that insane? Every game[0][1] I ever helped ship has had fully localized UI. In game development that seems to be the standard way of doing things. And it requires a lot of testing and sometimes comes with workflows to automatically test that all strings fit their intended box.
[0] Before I worked on game development I actually worked in virtual surgery simulation, and there we also had a localized UI with a very large number of supported languages and tooling to detect issues.
[1] Need For Speed (2015), NFS: Payback, NFS: Heat, Lost in Random, Wavetale
And accessibilize it. Pixel perfect per zoom level per language per font variant per font.
Don't forget increased-contrast too!
Anyone who ever worked as a front end developer definitely felt this.
Even as a backend dev who dabbles in frontend as a hobby - I get the view looking great on desktop, then a week later I open the site on mobile and am horrified