In product design, the main challenge is getting people to use your product. To do that, we first need to understand the people we're designing for.
This can be tough for any product team. However, it gets even harder when you’re building for a different culture.
In our Other Land team, we’ve had the opportunity to work with different cultures and markets, with one of them being the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. It encompasses various cultures and languages, making it incredibly complex and interesting to us.
We’ve dealt with amazing companies in the MENA region, helping them apply best practices from other cultures and locations to solving challenges in their market. And we’ve learned a lot along the way.
Now, we’re sharing our experience here, hoping that you will find it useful.
Levels of understanding
Imagine you want to bring a successful product concept from one market to completely different culture.
First, you need to accept that your assumptions won’t give you a full understanding of who you’re designing for, how they view the problem, and what solutions they’re already using (if any).
Without a clear view of the new market, there’s a high risk of failure — the audience may see the core problem differently.
That’s why gathering the right information is critical:
- Cultural and technological context: Learn who your target audience (TA) is, how they use technology, who and what they trust, and the values shaping their interests, doubts, and choices.
- Problem validation: Find out if this problem matters to them, how they currently solve it, their fears, doubts, aspirations, and measures of success.
- User perceptions and communications: Identify patterns in language, dialects, symbols, colors, and media to create a “vocabulary” of meanings for your product.
This process requires deep discovery — conduct user interviews, gather feedback, and test hypotheses. Building relationships with your audience helps you understand their worldview and how they might see your product.
Cultural and technical context
Countries and cultures in the MENA region vary in digital adoption due to connectivity, logistics, and regulatory issues, which slows tech development and encourages people to use non-digital solutions.
Culturally, some areas are more reserved about learning from abroad, more group-focused, and more inclined to trust authorities and institutions, which also shapes how tech is viewed.
As a result, the digital product market is still in its early growth stages. A smaller tech talent pool and fewer established practices add to the challenge — but also create opportunity.
By combining global experience with understanding of the local context, entrepreneurs can build useful and successful products for the developing market.
UI/UX localization
Designing for the MENA region requires special attention to things like language differences, how text is placed on the page, and how visuals complement UI copy. You also need to consider what’s considered familiar, appropriate, or even offensive, especially when it comes to symbols, colors, and images.
To do’s:
- Translate and proofread: Ensure all your content is translated and proofread for the local language and that fonts remain consistent across languages.
- Consider reading direction: Some areas use RTL (Right-to-Left) languages like Arabic and Hebrew, which means you need to adapt elements accordingly.
- Avoid culturally inappropriate elements: Steer clear of icons (like hearts and stars), colors (be cautious with red, yellow, and black), and imagery that may be offensive, considering male and female roles and hierarchical nuances.
- Design a user-friendly interface: Create an interface that doesn’t rely heavily on language—use clear icons, logical navigation, and familiar patterns to make the experience accessible.
- Respect local culture: Acknowledge forms of greeting and traditions when personalizing interfaces for certain user segments.
Infrastructural challenges
Some places have strong internet access and logistics, so people use mobile apps for everyday tasks. In other areas, weak connectivity and logistics mean many people stick to cash and offline methods.
Also, make sure you are aware of not only product usage scenarios but also the complex picture, which involves the daily context of your audience. And then, build the product with this knowledge at its core, which will help focus on eliminating obstacles well before adding nice-to-have features.
To do’s:
- Optimize data usage and resource demands: Compress images, use optimized formats (like WebP), reduce video content, and streamline code. Implement lazy loading and use SVG images where possible to improve performance while saving space.
- Offer offline options: Let users download content in advance to access when offline, store more on their devices instead of constantly loading from the internet, and sync data when a connection becomes available. Cache data and ensure only new or updated content is downloaded, not everything.
- Explore alternative technologies: Use technologies like GPS and Bluetooth to provide value when internet access is limited. Location-based services can deliver relevant information or enable offline transactions.
- Prioritize battery efficiency: Design with battery life in mind, especially for users with unreliable power. Use dark mode with black backgrounds on OLED screens to save power, as display pixels remain off in black areas.
Premises of trust
The speed of tech adoption relies on trust. E.g., if cash is the most popular currency format in a certain area, you wouldn’t expect the same adoption of a digital banking product as in the areas where users routinely use digital payment solutions.
Therefore, consider explicit work on educating users, creating transparent customer journeys, and providing clear information on all policies that you follow to protect users. Include various ways of supporting users along their interaction with the product based on what they find most convenient and familiar.
To do’s:
- Make onboarding simple and relatable: Clearly explain how the product works, its benefits, and address any concerns users might have. Use plain language and intuitive visuals to guide them through the process. Strive to be both clear and familiar to them—this will help you get them to the value part faster.
- Create in-app guidance: Provide tutorials, tooltips, and help sections within the app for various use cases to assist users as they navigate through the product. This can help users get the most value of the product, make them more satisfied, and reduce customer support load.
- Offer local customer support: Provide help in local languages and through popular channels (like WhatsApp, which is widely used in Saudi Arabia and the UAE). This shows your commitment to the market and makes support accessible.
- Be transparent about privacy and security: Explain how you follow privacy and security policies and then validate with users how clear it is for them. Regularly update users on any changes to privacy policies and security protocols to maintain their trust and confidence in your product.
- Share real-world success stories: Demonstrate how your product has helped others in the MENA region through visual storytelling. Testimonials and case studies can help build trust.
Growth challenges
If the tech niche isn’t very active and the digital product market isn’t very populated, product-building practices would often come from conservative areas. This leads to building rigid processes, slow development, and overspending.
To prevent that, you need processes that allow you to create and validate assumptions as quickly as possible with minimal resources. Then, after you have sufficient proof of the concept, you can invest more resources into building market-ready versions.
To-do’s:
- Set up iterative processes: Implement processes that allow you to quickly update designs and features based on user feedback and market changes. Cultivate the habit of saying “no” to second-order functionality and stay focused on mastering the features that provide core value to users.
- Apply modular approaches: A modular structure makes maintaining the system easier and more cost-efficient. You can update or fix individual parts without affecting everything else, allowing different teams to work on separate modules simultaneously. It also prevents duplicating work done earlier and "reinventing the wheel."
- Create and rely on a design system: Establish a comprehensive design system early in the development process. It will help reduce design and development costs and create consistent product experiences for users.
- Collect ongoing feedback: Continuously validate sensitive decisions through interviews, focus groups, and beta testing.
Scaling and continuous optimization
The core prerequisite for success at scale is the one you set at the beginning and strive to stick to as best as you can—establishing the right processes and focusing on building what users need, not what you want them to need.
A well-established feedback process, continuous market analysis, and disciplined prioritization would be best friends. And then, on the execution side, reuse as much as possible, avoid unnecessary complexity, and optimize what you have in a timely manner.
- Keep optimizing: Don’t wait until issues arise—prevent them by regularly reviewing your code, design, and features. Allocating at least 10% of the team’s time each sprint for refactoring and optimization of existing functionality can prevent unexpected breakdowns.
- Avoid adding unnecessary complexity: Reuse design elements and adhere to your design system. It’s not about aesthetics only, it also helps users navigate your product, reducing their time-to-value and making them more satisfied about regular usage.
- Track performance: Monitor success indicators, key metrics, and user behavior to identify areas for improvement. Combine this data with continuous communication with users to align quantitative data with qualitative feedback.
- Stay updated: In addition to performance and feedback data, conduct competitive analysis. Regularly monitor products in your niche to identify gaps and opportunities. Altogether, this will help you make better product decisions.
Conclusion
The MENA region has huge potential with its cultural diversity and growing digital space. The timing is also favorable now due to improvements on the regulatory side, increasing investment interest, governmental support in certain areas, and overall technological progress.
To use these possibilities, you need to understand what kind of audience you’re serving and what they actually need. Start with cultural and technical challenges of your TA and the problem they need to be solved. And then move to earning trust by communicating yourself clearly and with respect to the audience.
Well-established iterative processes, modular approaches, and design systems will help with this as you will be able to better optimize resources and reduce building and validation time.
Finally, never let relationships with users get out of your focus. Get feedback and make sure it works both ways, meaning you address what you hear from them in your product and support.
All these steps will help you not only enter the market but also build products that improve lives and therefore earn long-term user loyalty.
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