Exploring amBiDiguity: UI item direction interpretation by Arabic and Hebrew users

Bidirectional user interfaces serve more than half a billion users worldwide. Despite increasing diversity-driven approaches to interface development, bidirectional interfaces still use UI elements inconsistently. In particular, UI items containing ambiguous information that BiDi users might process both from right-to-left and left-to-right pose a challenge to designers. We use the term amBiDiguous to denote such items and suggest that they are susceptible to ineffective use.

This paper reports on an empirical study with 1705 Arabic and Hebrew users, in which we collected explicit and implicit data about ambiguous UI items in bidirectional interfaces. We explored the directional interpretation of amBiDiguous UI items and investigated the influence of individual, linguistic, and UI design factors on how people perceive them. The findings suggest a complex picture in which various factors affect ambiguous items’ interpretation. While the analysis indicates that preventing all interpretation errors is probably impossible, a large portion of those errors can be addressed by proper design.