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Ilyes Massoudi
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العربية
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Conversion and enquiries

Homepage and user experience: what a Gulf visitor decides in five seconds

Ilyes Massoudi7 min read

The short answer

User experience is how easily a visitor understands what you offer, finds what they want and contacts you, not how attractive the colours are. A Gulf visitor on a phone decides within five seconds of the first screen: what you do, for whom, where, and how to get in touch. A good homepage answers those four questions before any scrolling, then delivers in order: the main services as clear links, proof you are real, then one contact method repeated. Everything else, from generic slogans to large sliders and long menus, delays the decision or prevents it.

User experience without the jargon

Many people search for user experience and UI UX to learn the field or hire a designer. This article is for the business owner who wants to know why visitors do not contact them, and hears from the designer that the problem is “the experience”.

The practical definition: user experience is the answer to three questions from the visitor’s point of view. Did I understand within seconds what this site offers? Did I find what I was looking for without effort? Could I contact or buy without frustration? Anything that does not serve those three questions is decoration.

The five-second test

Open your homepage on the phone of someone who does not know your business, close it after five seconds, then ask: what does this site do? For whom? In which city? How do you contact them?

If they get one question wrong, the first screen has failed, whatever its design. The commonest answer I hear in this test on Gulf sites: “a company… solutions… something about quality”.

What the homepage contains, in order

  1. The first screen: a headline naming the service, the audience and the city in the same words people search. One line on who it is for. A WhatsApp or call button. No image filling the whole screen.
  2. The main services: three to six cards, each a link to the service page, named as people search for the service.
  3. Proof: real Google Maps reviews with the link, photographs of work, verifiable numbers, the name of the person in charge.
  4. How it works: three steps from contact to delivery, because the visitor wants to know what happens after pressing the button.
  5. The price or a signal of it: “from”, “fixed price”, or “a quote within the hour”.
  6. Frequently asked questions: five real questions customers ask on WhatsApp.
  7. The footer: commercial registration, VAT number, address, working hours, the number as text.

Design mistakes I see on Arabic websites

  • A slider at the top. Slows loading and buries the headline. Remove it and place one headline.
  • A flipped English template. Icons pointing the wrong way, numbers broken apart, text left-aligned in places. The technical details are in the Arabic technical SEO article.
  • A thin, small Arabic font. The comfortable minimum on mobile is around 17 pixels for Arabic, at regular weight rather than light.
  • Many buttons in equal colours. One primary button in one colour repeated, everything else a link.
  • Pop-ups on entry. A newsletter sign-up before the visitor has read a line. It loses more than it gains.
  • An About page with no name. Vision, mission and values, and not one person with a name and a photograph.
  • A menu of internal names. Solutions, Sectors, Resources. The visitor is looking for the name of their service.

What design tools measure and what they cannot

Heatmaps and session recordings in Microsoft Clarity show where visitors click, where they stall and where they leave. That is the real test of the experience, and it is free. It is explained in the Clarity article. What no tool measures: whether the visitor believed what they read, which is why the first screen and the proof remain a human decision.

Where this sits in the audit

The audit scores site structure, ease of navigation and design quality on mobile as separate dimensions, and flags the faults that block conversion page by page: where the visitor stalls, and which fix recovers the most of them with the least effort, ranked by impact against effort.

Common questions

What is the difference between UI and UX?
The user interface, UI, is what you see: colours, fonts, buttons, spacing. The user experience, UX, is what happens to you: did you understand, did you find it, did you manage to make contact without frustration. An interface can be beautiful with a poor experience, which describes many carefully designed Gulf websites that bring no enquiries. The audit measures the experience on mobile, not the beauty of the interface.
How many items should the main menu have?
Five to seven at most; on mobile three or four visible and the rest inside the menu. Each item named after the service as people search for it, not after internal names. Our Services is a weak item; Tank Cleaning and Roof Insulation are strong ones. And the menu does not replace service links within the page itself.
Do sliders and video in the first screen hurt?
Usually yes on mobile in the Gulf. They slow loading on a phone network, push the headline below the screen, and distract from the one question the visitor arrived with. If you want video, place it after the first screen, compressed, not autoplaying, with text explaining what it shows.

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