We recently began a design project with a company based in Saudi Arabia. The open innovation community is going to be in Arabic, so we decided to design it all in Arabic and fill it in with Arabic filler text.
What happened next was fascinating.
Because our brains were not registering the words, we looked at the first round of designs through an entirely different lens. Instead of copy and buttons and calls to actions, we saw the designs only by colors, shapes, icons and images.
Our early designs would require some explaining to anyone we showed them to, but after some time and fiddling, we could show someone the design in Arabic and they could navigate it. They could explain what they thought was going on and it was right. They could pick out where they should add comments, what the various galleries of content being presented.
I think if we had done this same process in English or even Lorem Ipsum, we would have relied on the text too heavily. When we were forced to use basic icons, shapes, colors and visual queues as the only means of communication, and our awesome partners at Young & Hungry we were forced to simplify.
I think even when we have English community sites to design, we might start the process with Arabic, or Chinese or some other language with different characters to define a more pure and usable UX before we start adding copy.
Try it sometime.