Localizing & Internationalizing

As the only designer who had created right-to-left (R2L) designs before, I was the natural choice to lead an Israel localization project. The resulting site met its $15M revenue goal with over 80% user satisfaction rates and high-profile merchant sign-ups.

Designing R2L layouts

For most people, getting their head around right-to-left layouts is a struggle. Once you've got the hang of it, it's easy. Until then it feels as if it's going to break your brain. 

So I wasn't surprised when my team mates had problems at first. I had followed standard operating procedure for localizing sites - showing wireframes in English and the localized language side by side.

I knew I was onto something when I saw developers draw English R2L wireframes on the whiteboard. With this new tool, they were able to get over the hump in the learning curve and become fluent in right-to-left layouts. 

To help my team mates, I created a third wireframe. It's a R2L layout but with English labels.