  Hundreds of millions of speakers of bidirectional (BiDi) languages rely on
writing systems that mix the native right-to-left script with left-to-right
strings. The global reach of interactive digital technologies requires special
attention to these people, whose perception of interfaces is affected by this
script mixture. However, empirical research on this topic is scarce. Although
leading software vendors provide guidelines for BiDi design, bidirectional
interfaces demonstrate inconsistent and incorrect directionality of UI
elements, which may cause user confusion and errors. Through a websites'
review, we identified problematic UI items and considered reasons for their
existence. In an online survey with 234 BiDi speakers, we observed that in many
cases, users' direction preferences were inconsistent with the guidelines. The
findings provide potential insights for design rules and empirical evidence for
the problem's complexity, suggesting the need for further empirical research
and greater attention by the HCI community to the BiDi design problem.
