Towards the Right Direction in BiDirectional User Interfaces

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges of designing effective bidirectional user interfaces for languages that mix right-to-left and left-to-right scripts, highlighting inconsistencies and user preferences.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence of UI directionality issues in BiDi interfaces and emphasizes the need for improved design guidelines and further research.

Findings

Inconsistent UI directionality causes user confusion.

Users' preferences often conflict with existing guidelines.

Empirical data highlights complexity in BiDi interface design.

Abstract

Hundreds of millions of speakers of bidirectional (BiDi) languages rely on writing systems that mix the native right-to-left script with left-to-right strings. The global reach of interactive digital technologies requires special attention to these people, whose perception of interfaces is affected by this script mixture. However, empirical research on this topic is scarce. Although leading software vendors provide guidelines for BiDi design, bidirectional interfaces demonstrate inconsistent and incorrect directionality of UI elements, which may cause user confusion and errors. Through a websites' review, we identified problematic UI items and considered reasons for their existence. In an online survey with 234 BiDi speakers, we observed that in many cases, users' direction preferences were inconsistent with the guidelines. The findings provide potential insights for design rules and empirical evidence for the problem's complexity, suggesting the need for further empirical research and greater attention by the HCI community to the BiDi design problem.