Designing an interface that barely needs language

DeskDrawer's Store listing is in 16 languages. The application itself is built so that using it depends very little on reading text in any of them.

The DeskDrawer listing on the Microsoft Store is available in 16 languages. The application underneath it is not translated into 16 languages, and mostly does not need to be — which is a consequence of how it is built rather than a claim about it.

The starting point was not localization#

The menus became icon-only for a different reason: they had to be small. A menu that appears when you right-click a board's name sits directly on top of your desktop, and a list of eight text commands is a large opaque rectangle covering the thing you are working with.

Icons made the menu roughly a third of the size. Sorting is an arrow and a symbol; icon size is four squares of increasing size; outline is a rectangle; quit is a power symbol.

The localization benefit was noticed afterwards, and it turned out to be the larger one.

Three decisions that removed language from the interface#

The menus contain no sentences. Both the Board menu and the Tray menu are glyph-only. There is nothing in either to translate, because there is nothing in either to read.

New boards are numbered, not named. In 1.0.5 the default name for a new board became 1, 2, 3… rather than a word like "Board" or "New group". A number is the same in every language a Windows user is likely to be running, and it means a layout never contains a word its owner does not read.

System icon names come from Windows. In 1.0.6 the names of shell items — This PC, Recycle Bin, Network — stopped coming from a built-in string table and started coming from the shell. They therefore appear in the user's Windows display language: Este equipo, この PC, Dieser PC. Not because DeskDrawer translated them, but because it stopped pretending it knew them.

The largest one was free#

The most text-heavy surface in the application is the right-click menu on a file — twenty or more commands, plus whatever 7-Zip, Git, your antivirus and your cloud client have added.

DeskDrawer does not write that menu. It asks the Windows shell for the item's real Shell context menu and displays it. See Menus.

That decision was made for correctness — a hand-written menu silently loses every extension you have installed. But it also means the most language-dense part of the interface arrives already translated, in your Windows display language, including third-party entries, at no cost and with no translation to keep current.

This is the pattern behind all of it: delegating to Windows means inheriting Windows' localization. Reimplementing means owning the translation forever.

What is left in English, honestly#

The application ships without satellite resource assemblies — English only for the few strings it owns. Those strings are error text, and the contents of error.log. This website and its documentation are English only too.

You meet none of these in normal use. You meet them when something has gone wrong, which is also when you are most likely to be reading Troubleshooting or writing to Support.

What the claim actually is#

Not "DeskDrawer supports every language". It does not, and no amount of icon design would make that true.

The accurate claim is narrower and, I think, more interesting: the Store listing is available in 16 languages, and the application is built so that using it depends very little on reading text in any language at all. If yours is not one of the 16, you will meet very little friction in the product itself — not because it was translated for you, but because there is not much there to translate.

The user-facing version of this is on the Languages documentation page.