Non-ASCII characters in messages

Context

At Apptegy, our core product was called the Live Feed — its a place where users can post to many platforms from the same place. (SMS, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

Problem

Non-ASCII characters when encoded for SMS take up twice the space, cutting the allowable character count for messages from 1400 down to 700. The task was to come up with a way to explain this technical limitation to our not technical users.

*artists interpretation of the problem

Solution

Give users context only when they need it. We'd highlight characters that triggered the business rule and show them the snippet of UI below. Working with both web and mobile developers to properly highlight the character in the text input field was the highlight of this project.

Impact

Messages would no longer silently fail due to breaking character limits, increasing the number of successful messages and decreasing the amount of support conversations.

In a perfect world

I think the better solution to this problem would be to truncate messages that are too long and send along a link that would take you to a webpage where you could read the full content. This would mean clients would never have to worry about character limits again.