73 Top Saudi Sites Were Analyzed for Font Morphology, Image Design and User Preferences | HackerNoon

Table of Links

Abstract and I. Introduction

II. Previous Works

III. Research Methodology

IV. Font and Image Inspection Studies

V. Results

VI. Discussion

VII. Conclusions, Future Research Directions, and References

IV. FONT AND IMAGE INSPECTION STUDIES

A. The Morphology of the Arabic Language

Before delving into the details of the studies conducted in this research, a brief introduction to the Arabic language is given. Arabic is one of the richest Semitic languages with more than 12 million unique words and 300 million speakers across the globe. Arabic is written from right to left. In essence, words are created from a set of 28 distinct letters, with 15 letters using dots, either above or below the letter (as depicted in Fig. 2). The Arabic letters use diacritics which create different meanings according to the context of use.

Table I demonstrates how applying well-known font types changes the look and feel and overall readability of the Arabic text. The selected fonts to showcase are the most used fonts as per our analysis below. This includes Times New Roman, Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, Cairo, and Droid Arabic Kufi. All font types are applied to the same sentence and are sized to 8 points (~ 11 pixels).

B. Selection of the Arabic Websites

A total of 73 differing Arabic websites were selected and evaluated on several metrics with a focus on font and image characteristics as detailed below. The selected online websites for investigation were the most visited websites by users living in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia according to the latest ranking (i.e. February 2019) of Alexa Internet [30]. Technically, Alexa ranks websites locally or globally using multiple Internet browsing and web traffic criteria, including the number of monthly unique visitors to the site, number of site views for the last three months, and average time spent viewing the website. The websites we decided to investigate were the most visited Arabic websites and included 52 local websites (71.23%) and 21 international websites (28.77%). This enabled us to learn about the font and image related design practices of both local (e. g. Souq, Almubasher … etc.) and international sites (e. g. Google, YouTube, Microsoft … etc.). A selected sample of the tested Arabic websites is shown below in Fig. 3, Fig. 4, and Fig. 5.

Fig. 6 depicts the distribution of 73 top ranked Arabic websites according to their genre. Notably, Government websites were the most commonly visited websites among the Saudi population, with 14 websites. This was followed by news (13 websites), corporate (11), education (9), e-commerce (7), entertainment (5) and social media (4) websites. The remaining sites (12 websites) spread across diverse categories, such as charity, search engine, travel, and tourism, etc.