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Usability Principles Do Translate into Arabic

Interview with Ali Al-Ibrahim

Of course, simply attending a Nielsen Norman Group conference shows a high level of interest in the usability field. But a graduate student spending his own money to attend? That’s more than interest—that’s commitment.

Ali Al-Ibrahim is a graduate student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. A resident of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, his government pays for his tuition at Carnegie Mellon, but he paid to attend the conference out of his own pocket.

“I’m here to continue my studies—I want to be a designer,” he said. Back home, before going to graduate school, he was involved in ERP systems, and in Web design and development, especially in the healthcare field. For example, he recalled one project in which he marketed a hospital’s features with a 100-page site. Al-Ibrahim has been in the U.S. for 18 months and intends to graduate in August.

“I’m paying for this myself, because I think it will be my career,” he said. “Getting user requirements is very hard. I want to learn the process of gathering data on the users and how to do focus groups and usability studies. I’m not sure that anyone is doing it in Saudi Arabia, outside the big companies. I have studied usability and design in one of my classes, and I like Jakob Nielsen as a professional and his principles. I follow his articles and his books.

“Not many Saudis have good Web design skills—they have foreigners doing it, or they hire firms that are themselves off-shoring it,” Al-Ibrahim said. With his newly acquired skills, he said he might end up managing such designers when he gets home, but he also hopes to get into business and start an e-commerce site.

About 20 percent of the Saudi population has Internet access, but many use dial-up connections because DSL is expensive—a big usability factor for designers, he noted.

He said using Arabic didn’t change any of the design principles he was learning—although Arabic runs right to left, it is still alphabetic, he noted. But, he added, doing usability studies in Arabic could make him a pioneer in the field—he knows of no one else doing that.

Of his conference experience, Al-Ibrahim said, “I have learned many things—how to test usability the right way, how to communicate with focus groups, and how to use team skills. In graduate school, we learn theory, and here it is more about practice, and the user experience, and what they did with usability in case studies. In graduate school, there is also a lot of practical stuff in many fields—but nothing about usability,” he noted.