Understanding Usability Issues of Bidirectional Multilingual Websites
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Guren, Leah
tekom
2005

Abstract:

Many Israeli companies maintain websites that support both Hebrew and English; some also support Russian, Arabic, and several European languages. As we worked with clients to help them improve website usability, we discovered that no one had analyzed the problem of bidirectional website usability. We assumed that the visual hotspot area on the screen is influenced by the user's mother-tongue language; that is, we assumed that a native speaker of any left-to-right language would view the upper-left quadrant of the screen as the dominant visual area, while a native speaker of a right-to-left language (Hebrew or Arabic) would be drawn to the upper-right quadrant. We further assumed that this difference would affect the success of navigation elements, such as menus and internal links. Because no viable data in this area existed, we decided to launch our own research in November 2004.