What’s in Store for the Future of Arabic Web Design and Usability | 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

VII. CONCLUSIONS

The 73 top viewed Arabic websites from local and international service providers, covering a wide range of areas in Saudi Arabia such as government, news, and e-commerce, were carefully inspected with a focus on the fonts applied to format the Arabic text and images incorporated to improve the overall site attractiveness. The Arabic websites suffered from inconsistency for they mixed font types on the same web pages. The added value of such practice is ambiguous and invites the designers of Arabic websites to pay more attention to the application of fonts more consistently within and across pages.

Droid Arabic Kufi was dominant in formatting the titles and menus of the Arabic sites. This font type reflects the specific characteristics of the Arabic writing, especially that related to calligraphy. Nevertheless, Tahoma and Helvetica were also used frequently to style the titles and menus. Surprisingly, however, the analysis showed that famous fonts used to style English text, such as Tahoma, Helvetica, Arial and Times New Roman, are used to format the Arabic paragraphs. Nonetheless, a myriad of other font types was used to style the Arabic text, which shows that the Arabic websites still do not favor a particular font type to improve text legibility or attractiveness. Instead, web designers of Arabic websites seem to trust what international websites frequently use such as Helvetica and Arial. This might not be necessarily efficient for reading the Arabic characters and language. Arabic content on the web is still yet to find its appropriate font type and font size.

Images were extensively used in the Arabic websites, which may indeed increase user engagement and visual appeal. However, the high number of images resulted in lower website loading speed, which is a key quality factor in web design. The use of images in the Arabic websites revealed three main characteristics, masculinity, collectivism and conservatism. These characteristics are in agreement with the Saudi culture and its religious identity.

Despite the insights highlighted by the results, there are several qualifying limitations that have to be enumerated here. The aforementioned studies describe the current design practices pertaining to font and image usage within the Arabic websites and do not shed light on the rationale for their use nor do they test real users’ perception and judgment towards these practices. In other words, usability inspection studies do not allow obtaining a deep understanding of the effects of certain design decisions on user judgment and satisfaction. Follow-up studies are recommended to gauge user views and acceptability towards font and image usage in the Arabic websites. The inspection raised several interesting observations, but more statistical analysis is needed to assert differences between website categories.

VIII. FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

The herewith research provides a detailed outlook on the general practices of local and international websites in relation to the application of font and images in Arabic web design. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the use of font and images in Arabic websites extensively. Indeed, there is an overarching necessity to undertake more organized research focusing on these two important design elements. As part of a long-term agenda, we have already started to conduct a series controlled experiments in order to identify the most efficient Arabic font type and size to use in e-commerce websites as well as users‟ perception towards conservative and non-conservative images within fashion online stores and study how these images could influence customers‟ buying decisions. Researchers into the impact of typography on Arabic web usability should consider using eye-tracking to collect objective measures about Arabic reading performance and mental load. However, for the use of images, more user testing is required to judge users‟ attitudes and acceptance towards the shift in using less conservative images, especially in Arabic e-commerce websites, where buying decisions are greatly driven by the display of products such as clothes. Other interactive media such as animations and videos and their effect on user judgment and website performance would also need to be examined in the future.

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