Case Study: One Booking Flow Across Three Time Zones, in Arabic and English

Sonas Experts sells one thing: a private consultation with a US-trained, board-certified rheumatologist. The constraint that shaped the entire build was that the people booking it are not in one country. They are in the United States, across the Middle East, and in Europe — and a meaningful share of them read Arabic first.

The problem: one product, three regions, two reading directions

A single-service site sounds like the easy version of this job. It is not. When there is only one thing to sell, every objection has to be answered on the way to one button, and there is nowhere to hide a weak section. The page has to do the work of explaining who the session is for, who it is not for, what it does not replace, and what happens after — before anyone commits.

Then the audience splits three ways geographically and two ways linguistically. That combination is where most bilingual medical sites quietly fall apart.

What we built

Arabic designed, not translated

Arabic runs right to left, which means it is a layout problem wearing a translation problem's clothes. Navigation mirrors. Alignment mirrors. Directional icons have to flip or they point the wrong way. Form fields and reading order rearrange. On top of that, Arabic and English simply do not set the same way at the same nominal size — line lengths and visual weight differ, so a layout tuned only for English reads cramped once real Arabic copy lands in it.

The site was built expecting both directions from the start. The language toggle is in the header, and switching it produces a page that looks designed rather than reversed.

Booking that respects where the client actually is

The practitioner keeps US hours. The clients frequently do not. A booking interface that silently assumes one home time zone generates missed appointments and refund conversations, which for a high-value one-to-one session is an expensive failure. The flow is built so a visitor picks a time in terms they can trust, rather than doing mental arithmetic and hoping.

Boundaries stated on the page, not buried

This one is unusual, and it came from the client. The site says plainly what the session is not: it is education, advocacy, and support, not a substitute for the client's medical care. Most conversion-focused design instinct is to bury that. Here it is given real space on the page, because a client who books with the wrong expectation is worse than a client who does not book. Designing toward a clear boundary rather than around it was the most interesting constraint on the project.

Fast, on connections we do not control

We measured a 604 millisecond largest contentful paint and a 500 millisecond full load across 288KB and 10 requests. For an audience loading the page from three continents, page weight is not a vanity metric — it is the difference between a site that feels immediate in Amman and Chicago alike, and one that only feels fast to whoever is nearest the server.

What this case study does not tell you

It does not report bookings, revenue, or conversion rate. That is the client's private business data and it is not ours to publish. What we can publish is what was built, why each decision was made, and performance figures taken from a public URL that anyone can re-run.

We would rather give you a small number of checkable facts than a large number of unverifiable ones. Most of our portfolio — national design systems, government portals, airport platforms — is under NDA and cannot offer that. This project can.

Frequently asked questions