Arabic UX·
Common Arabic UX mistakes in GCC commerce
Translated interfaces are not Arabic interfaces. The most common — and most expensive — mistakes stores make when they treat RTL as a mirroring exercise.
Most Arabic commerce interfaces in the GCC were designed in English and translated afterwards. You can feel it immediately — and so can customers, even if they cannot name what is wrong. Arabic-first design is not patriotism; it is conversion work.
Mirroring everything — or mirroring nothing
RTL is not a global flip. Reading order mirrors; many things do not. Phone numbers, progress through time in media players, and product imagery orientation often stay LTR. Meanwhile navigation, hierarchy, and form flow must genuinely reverse. Teams that apply one rule to everything produce interfaces that are subtly wrong everywhere.
Latin-first typography with Arabic squeezed in
Arabic script has different proportions — taller ascenders, connected letterforms, no italics, different weight behavior. A type scale tuned for a Latin grotesk almost always renders Arabic too small, too tight, or too light. If your design system has one font-size scale for both scripts, Arabic is losing.
Truncation and letter-spacing
- Letter-spacing on connected Arabic script breaks the letterforms themselves. Tracking is a Latin tool.
- Aggressive truncation destroys Arabic product names faster than English ones — the meaning-carrying part of a phrase often comes late.
- ALL-CAPS emphasis has no Arabic equivalent; designs that rely on capitalization for hierarchy lose a whole tier of emphasis in Arabic.
Ignoring bilingual reality
GCC interfaces are almost never monolingual. Product names, brand names, and technical terms arrive in English inside Arabic sentences. Designs must handle mixed-direction text gracefully — in inputs, in search, in order summaries. This is where most checkout experiences quietly fall apart.
The fix is organizational, not technical
Every mistake above ships because Arabic was reviewed last, by whoever happened to read it. Stores that get this right design in Arabic first, review in Arabic first, and treat the English version as the adaptation. The CSS is the easy part.