Compact Chinese

When you design user interfaces in english you usually will have to make extra room (about 30%) on your rows to make sure you can translate your labels into languages like German and Finnish, which tend to have much longer words.



Look at all the space in this list! Chinese is really compact. I don't think the layout would look like this if it was intended for the local chinese market. If I had this much space in an interface I'd probably use it for split screen, or something else. I'm glad we translate our Swedish phones from American designs, rather than from Chinese. It would be a nightmare to be able to come up with meaningful words with three characters for every label.