Designing products for India and the UAE

Designing for India and the UAE is not the same as designing for a single Western market and then translating the text. These are diverse, fast moving regions with their own languages, scripts, payment habits, devices and expectations. A product that ignores those realities can look polished and still feel foreign to the people meant to use it. We build for these markets every day, and a few lessons come up again and again.

The core idea is that local is not a feature you add at the end. It is a set of assumptions you bake in from the start, because retrofitting them later is painful and expensive.

Many languages and scripts, not one

India alone has many widely spoken languages and several scripts. The UAE is deeply multilingual, with Arabic and English both central and large communities speaking many others. A product that only really works in English leaves a lot of users behind.

Two practical points matter here. First, text length changes dramatically between languages. A label that fits neatly in English can be much longer in another language, and a layout that assumed short English text breaks. Designing flexible layouts that tolerate longer and shorter text is essential, not optional.

Second, scripts have different needs. Some scripts are taller, some need more line height to stay readable, some have complex character shaping. Choosing fonts that genuinely support the scripts you serve, and testing real content in them, prevents the broken, boxy text that signals a product was never meant for that audience.

Right to left is a design decision, not a flag

Arabic is read right to left, and supporting it properly is far more than mirroring text. The entire layout flips. Navigation, icons, progress indicators, the direction of arrows and the flow of forms all change.

This is why right to left support has to be considered from the start. A layout built rigidly for left to right is hard to flip cleanly later. When we design for the UAE, we plan for both directions early, so that Arabic is a first class experience and not an awkward mirror of the English one.

• Layouts that flip cleanly, not just text that reverses.
• Icons and directional elements that make sense in both directions.
• Numbers, dates and currency formatted the way local users expect.
• Real Arabic content in testing, not placeholder text.

Right to left is not a checkbox you tick. It is a layout you design for from the first screen.

Payments are intensely local

Few things are more local than how people pay, and getting this wrong quietly kills conversion. In India, real time account to account payment through the unified payments system is everywhere, and people expect it. Cash on delivery still matters for a large share of buyers who want to pay only when goods arrive.

In the UAE, card usage is high, but local wallets and regional payment preferences matter, and trust signals around payment are important to users who are cautious online. Assuming everyone will happily enter a card number the way a customer in another market might is a costly mistake.

The practical lesson is to support the payment methods people in each market actually use, and to make those methods prominent rather than buried. A checkout that feels native to local habits converts far better than a generic one, however clean it looks.

Networks and devices are not uniform

A large share of users in these regions are on mid range phones and on mobile networks that vary from excellent to patchy within the same city. Designing as though everyone has a recent flagship on fast fibre produces a product that feels great in the studio and slow in the street.

This shapes real decisions. Keep pages light so they load on a weak connection. Design for the small and mid range screens many people actually hold. Make sure the product degrades gracefully when the network drops, rather than freezing or losing the user's work. We test on representative devices and throttled connections precisely because the comfortable conditions of a developer's desk hide these problems.

Cultural fit goes beyond translation

Finally, expectations differ in ways that no translation captures. Colour carries different meaning. Imagery that feels natural in one market can feel off in another. The level of formality in tone, the way trust is signalled, the prominence of customer support and human contact, all vary.

The way to get this right is not to guess from afar. It is to involve people from the market, test with real local users, and pay attention to what feels natural to them rather than to us. Small choices, the right greeting, a familiar payment logo, a local phone number for support, add up to a product that feels like it belongs.

Building well for India and the UAE rewards the effort. These are large, growing, digitally engaged markets, and users notice when a product was made with them in mind rather than adapted as an afterthought. Design for the languages, the scripts, the payment habits, the networks and the culture from the first screen, and you build something that feels local because it genuinely is.